ancient cities

424 Kracauer, Siegfried
operettas and musical comedies, Kracauer’s study
provides a panoramic and critical representation
of the prevailing cityscape from which these frivolous
works drew their inspiration and in which
they found acclaim: boulevards peopled by bohemians
and journalists; the world exhibitions; the
salons of fashionable society; the courtesans and the
demi-monde; and the court of Napoleon III, with its
imperial pomp and ceremony. Contemporaneous
with Benjamin’s planned but unwritten Arcades
Project, Kracauer similarly sought to disenchant
Paris, capital of the nineteenth century, as a locus
of phantasmagoria, dreams, and chimeras. As
itself an absurd “operetta world,” the Second
Empire found perfect expression in, and was subject
to critical debunking by, Offenbach’s seemingly
innocent musical enchantments. Laced
with unmistakable references to the brutality of
dictatorships and their phony spell of “joy and
glamour,” Kracauer’s study constitutes an exemplary
reading of the metropolitan life of the
recent past through one of its “surface,” cultural
phenomena.
Writing a Theory of Film
Kracauer escaped German-occupied France in
1941 and spent the rest of his life in New York
City. There he wrote and published the two major
(and much misunderstood and maligned) studies
of film and cinema for which he is best known in
Anglo-American scholarship: From Caligari to
Hitler: A Psychological History of the German
Film (1947) and Theory of Film: The Redemption
of Physical Reality (1960). These are of particular
relevance for urban studies for two reasons. First,
as part of his “psychological history” of Weimar
films as reflections or premonitions of deepseated
authoritarian predispositions and inclinations,
Kracauer discusses in some detail the
“street film” as a particular and popular genre
during the 1920s. These films, typically portraying
the doomed romantic rebellion of youth
against the restrictions and cozy comforts of the
bourgeois familial home, presented apparently
contrasting messages. Films like Die Strasse (1923)
served as warnings to the unwary as to the dangers
of the metropolitan street as a site of vice, corruption,
and brutality, whereas later variations on the
theme, like Die Freudlose Gasse (1925) and Asphalt
(1929), sentimentally contrasted the impoverished
integrity of a lowly but genuine life among social
outcasts with the arrant hypocrisy and crass conventions
of middle-class domesticity. The city as
threatening chaos; the city as romantic escape—
for Kracauer both of these clichéd images played
their part in preparing the German public for
what was to come.
Most significantly in the Caligari book,
Kracauer begins to identify and sketch some key
correspondences between the cinematic medium
itself and the urban environment. These find much
fuller development in, indeed become central to,
his subsequent attempt to delineate a more general
theory of film per se. For Kracauer, film has a
special elective affinity with the city. The movie
camera finds its most appropriate subject matter
in the perpetual mobility, fluidity, transience, and
happenstance of metropolitan existence. Film has
a particular penchant for the “flow of life” on the
urban street. Put another way: The city is itself
cinematic. Indeed, Kracauer argues, in its ability
to penetrate and record with unprecedented felicity
everyday street life, film promises to reawaken
our jaded senses to that which surrounds us. Film
captures and focuses our attention on what is usually
perceived in a state of weary distraction and
indifference. In so doing, film images facilitate a
new recognition and vital appreciation of our
everyday environment. Redeemed by film, the city
is restored to us. Film thereby becomes, for
Kracauer, the very medium by means of which
modern urbanites can overcome the rationalized
and routinized existence of the big city. Film offers
a home for the spiritually homeless.
Kracauer’s varied writings on the theme of the
city offer a kaleidoscopic, critical, and ultimately
redemptive vision of the modern metropolis and
popular urban culture.
Graeme Gilloch
See also Benjamin, Walter; Cinematic Urbanism; Flâneur;
Paris, France; Simmel, Georg
Further Readings
Frisby, David. 1988. Fragments of Modernity: Theories
of Modernity in the Work of Simmel, Kracauer and
Benjamin. Cambridge: MIT Press.