Cinema and experience : Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno

406 Pages·2012·1.95 MB·english

by  Miriam Hansen

Cinema and Experience
WEIMAR AND NOW: GERMAN CULTURAL CRITICISM
Edward Dimendberg, Martin Jay, and Anton Kaes, General Editors
Cinema and Experience
Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin,
and Th eodor W. Adorno
Miriam Bratu Hansen
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
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© 2012 by Th e Regents of the University of California
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hansen, Marian Bratu, 1949–2011.
Cinema and experience : Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and
Th eodor W. Adorno / Miriam Bratu Hansen.
p. cm.—(Weimar and now: German cultural criticism ; 44)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-520-26559-2 (cloth : alk. paper)
isbn 978-0-520-26560-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Motion pictures. 2. Kracauer, Siegfried, 1889–1966—Criticism
and interpretation. 3. Benjamin, Walter, 1892–1940—Criticism and
interpretation. 4. Adorno, Th eodor W., 1903–1969—Criticism and
interpretation. I. Title.
PN1994.H265 2012
791.4309—dc23 2011017754
Manufactured in the United States of America
20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible
and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on
Rolland Enviro100, a 100 percent postconsumer fi ber paper that is FSC
certifi ed, deinked, processed chlorine-free, and manufactured with
renewable biogas energy. It is acid-free and EcoLogo certifi ed.
For Michael Geyer
In memory of Karsten Witte (1944–1995)

contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xix
Abbreviations xxi
part i. kracauer
1. Film, Medium of a Disintegrating World 3
2. Curious Americanism 40
part ii. benjamin
3. Actuality, Antinomies 75
4. Aura: Th e Appropriation of a Concept 104
5. Mistaking the Moon for a Ball 132
6. Micky-Maus 163
7. Play-Form of Second Nature 183
part iii. adorno
8. Th e Question of Film Aesthetics 207
part iv. kracauer in exile
9. Th eory of Film 253
Notes 281
Index 357

preface
Th e question of how “to engage a living thought that is no longer historically
current,” raised by Fredric Jameson with regard to Th eodor W. Adorno, has a par-
ticular urgency when the body of thought revolves around the cinema, especially
in today’s rapidly changing media environment.1 If that ongoing future increas-
ingly became one of the concerns ticking in the background of this study, it also
made me more keenly aware of the specifi c historicity of the writings discussed—
less in the sense of their loss of “currency” than in their contemporaneity with key
junctures in the history of the cinema and the social and political histories of the
twentieth century. Much as they illuminate those junctures, they oft en do so from
an untimely angle, which lends them a diff erent kind of actuality in the present.
At the same time, I couldn’t fail to realize the extent to which this project was
bound up with my own history, a history that entailed switching countries, lan-
guages, and fi elds—from Germany to the United States, from German to English,
from the study of literary modernism and the avant-garde to the study of fi lm.
When I began to read my way into American cinema studies around 1980, the
fi eld was dominated by psychoanalytic-semiotic fi lm theory, with its ground-
ing in Lacan and Freud, Althusserian Marxism, and feminism, which had taken
Anglophone shape in the British journals Screen and Edinburgh Magazine and the
then-Berkeley-based Camera Obscura. Th is hegemony soon waned, challenged by
the competing and asymmetrical paradigms of, on the one hand, cultural studies
and, on the other, neoformalism or historical poetics and cognitivism. Yet the
intellectual energy that had made psychoanalytic-semiotic theory a magnet for
ix
x preface
fi lm scholars and a motor in the academic legitimation of cinema studies—at a
time when the humanities were under the sway of poststructuralism—seemed to
have migrated into the exploration of early cinema, beginning with the legendary
Brighton symposium of 1978 and richly fed by the annual Pordenone Giornate del
Cinema Muto and other retrospectives. I felt drawn to the study of early cinema,
not least because it engaged fi lm history in a theoretically inspired mode that
interlaced careful attention to formal and stylistic features with empirical research
into conditions of production, distribution, and exhibition as well as broader ques-
tions concerning the complex set of transformations commonly referred to as
modernity.
I had come from a country in which there was eff ectively no tradition of fi lm
qualifying as the object of academic inquiry (with a few exceptions during the
early decades of the twentieth century). Th ere was nothing comparable to the
organizational eff orts in instruction, archiving, and research in the United States
and France, which in recent years have themselves become the object of historical
research. To be sure, fi lm history and fi lm theory were part of the curricula of the
fi lm academies (Ulm, Munich, Berlin) that had been founded thanks to the fi lm
politics following the 1962 Oberhausen manifesto, but these topics had no place
at the universities. At the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University of Frankfurt am
Main, where I was a student from 1967 to 1976, Karsten Witte’s courses on National
Socialist fi lm and on “theory of cinema” (1970–71) were an early exception, fol-
lowed by the fi rst fi lm courses in American Studies, which was one of my fi elds.2
In addition, Alexander Kluge taught a series of compact seminars on fi lm and
media in 1975–76, which I attended (and which initiated an enduring relationship
of collaboration between us).
It was not that Germany—more precisely, West Germany or the Federal Repub-
lic—was lacking a fi lm culture. While commercial theaters had been closing in
great numbers and audiences were staying home to watch television, a new wave
of alternative repertory theaters, both private and municipally sponsored (Kom-
munale Kinos), took off around 1970; the same year, a festival of independent
cinema (Frankfurter Filmschau ’70) was held on the campus of Frankfurt Univer-
sity. In the aft ermath of the student movement, a new moviegoing public emerged,
eager to overcome a history still deeply compromised by Nazi cinema’s usurpa-
tion of cinematic aff ect and pleasure. We watched everything: “Young German”
and European auteurs, New Hollywood and old, Spaghetti Westerns, the canonic
works of international silent and sound cinema, contemporary experimental and
underground fi lms. Th is new fi lm culture crucially included intellectually pointed
critical writing on fi lm—in the Feuilleton or cultural sections of major papers
such as Frankfurter Rundschau, Süddeutsche Zeitung, and occasionally, Frank-
furter Allgemeine and Die Zeit—by authors such as Frieda Grafe, Helmut Faerber,