Plenarveranstaltung II »Die Gesellschaftlichkeit des Films«

20.05.2022 - Videos

Inga Pollmann
(University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
»Kracauers Medium«

Across his work, which extends into various disciplines and concerns various media, Kracauer employs a complex notion of medium and mediation. In his treatise on the detective novel, the human being itself is understood existentially as median being, suspended between lower and upper realms of existence, while in his street texts, specific locales are described as media in a more biological sense of the term, that is, as enabling and nourishing something (in this case, epistemological insights) and containing historical sediments. This talk seeks to connect Kracauer’s understanding of medium and mediation in his early texts to his later writings about film. Kracauer’s medium, understood existentially, environmentally, and aesthetically, bears the marks of his indebtedness to life-philosophy, not least in his direct references to life, but also to body, space and image relations, as well as in the notions of endlessness and continuum so central to Theory of Film and the »passive activity« of the citizen, spectator, and historian. His work is underwritten by correspondences among image aesthetic, philosophical system, and writing style, and the emergent theory of medium in his writing points toward an environmental aesthetic the political implications of which allow us to see anew Kracauer’s currency for both contemporary cinema and critical thought.

Johannes von Moltke
(University of Michigan)
»Kracauer’s Media Anthropology«

New media unsettle old humanisms. The advent of cinema, no less than the rise of television or the iPhone, reconfigured the relation between humans and (media) technologies, prompting critics to theorize this reconfiguration in turn. In this sense, film theory always involves media anthropology. Even where it foregrounds aesthetic questions about »film as art«, hermeneutic questions about the meanings of individual films or genres, or sociopolitical questions about the relationship between cinema, society, and ideology, film theory at some level inevitably confronts the question of how cinema inflects the very notion of what it means to be human.
In this talk, I trace the media anthropological impulses that run through Siegfried Kracauer’s life-long work on film, from his Weimar-era film reviews through the Marseille notebooks of the early 1940s, to his American writings and his culminating Theory of Film. In developing his »material aesthetics« for that book, Kracauer sets the cinema »in the perspective of something more general – an approach to the world, a mode of human existence«, thus advancing broad anthropological claims about a medium that he significantly considers to be »not exclusively human«. In my talk, I trace that perspective back to Kracauer’s earlier writings, asking how he configures human lifeworlds and technological media in developing his film theory.

Moderation: Leonie Hunter

Internationale Siegfried Kracauer Konferenz 2022
20. Mai 2022
Hörsaal IV, Hörsaalgebäude, Campus Bockenheim
Frankfurt am Main

Video/Ton/Schnitt: Public noise
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