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PREFACE

The question of how “to engage a living thought that is no longer historically current,” raised by Fredric Jameson with regard to Theodor W. Adorno, has a particular urgency when the body of thought revolves around the cinema, especially in today’s rapidly changing media environment.¹ If that ongoing future increasingly became one of the concerns ticking in the background of this study, it also made me more keenly aware of the specific 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 often do so from an untimely angle, which lends them a different 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, languages, and fields—from Germany to the United States, from German to English, from the study of literary modernism and the avant-garde to the study of film. When I began to read my way into American cinema studies around 1980, the field was dominated by psychoanalytic-semiotic film theory, with its grounding 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. This 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 film 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 film 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 questions concerning the complex set of transformations commonly referred to as modernity.

I had come from a country in which there was effectively no tradition of film qualifying as the object of academic inquiry (with a few exceptions during the early decades of the twentieth century). There was nothing comparable to the organizational efforts 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, film history and film theory were part of the curricula of the film academies (Ulm, Munich, Berlin) that had been founded thanks to the film 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 film and on “theory of cinema” (1970–71) were an early exception, followed by the first film courses in American Studies, which was one of my fields.² In addition, Alexander Kluge taught a series of compact seminars on film 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 Republic—was lacking a film 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 (Kommunale Kinos), took off around 1970; the same year, a festival of independent cinema (Frankfurter Filmschau ’70) was held on the campus of Frankfurt University. In the aftermath of the student movement, a new moviegoing public emerged, eager to overcome a history still deeply compromised by Nazi cinema’s usurpation of cinematic affect 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 films. This new film culture crucially included intellectually pointed critical writing on film—in the Feuilleton or cultural sections of major papers such as Frankfurter Rundschau, Süddeutsche Zeitung, and occasionally, Frankfurter Allgemeine and Die Zeit—by authors such as Frieda Grafe, Helmut Faerber, Wolfram Schütte, Karsten Witte, Gertrud Koch, Hartmut Bitomsky, and others. And not least, there was the flourishing of independent filmmaking that benefitted from public television stations and from subsidy legislation fought for by Kluge and others, and from which a group of Autoren or auteur directors (Fassbinder, Herzog, Wenders, et al.) was to become New German Cinema once their work was shown at the New York Film Festival and other international venues such as the Goethe Institutes.

When I studied at Frankfurt University, Critical Theory was the leading intellectual tradition, one that had early on analyzed the economic, social, and political conditions of fascism and had presciently warned of the rise of National Socialism; it also had assumed a critical role vis-à-vis the social and cultural order of postwar Germany, in particular its inability to “come to terms” with that historical legacy.³ By the 1960s, the term Critical Theory was used in a broader sense to name both the Frankfurt School (referring to the members of the Institute for Social Research who had returned from exile, notably Max Horkheimer, who had coined the term Critical Theory; Adorno; and former members such as Herbert Marcuse and Leo Löwenthal who had opted to stay in the United States) and writers associated with various forms and degrees of Marxist thought, such as Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Georg Lukács, and Siegfried Kracauer, as well as a younger generation of writers such as Jürgen Habermas, Oskar Negt, and Kluge.⁴

If I now, in this book, think of Kracauer, Benjamin, and Adorno not only as Critical Theorists but also as part of the German-Jewish intellectual tradition, this was not necessarily the case when I first encountered their writings (and, with Adorno, his teaching); and one would probably not have thought of Adorno in that tradition before 1933. Being Jewish was not a topic of conversation at the university when I was a student, nor anywhere else beyond the small, newly emerging Jewish congregations and organizations devoted to Christian-Jewish cooperation. Jewishness was a relatively abstract, yet highly charged symbolic—philosophical, moral, and political—category, bound up with the history of anti-Semitism and annihilation. It had presence primarily as a repressed past that had to be brought to public consciousness and justice: this had been the twofold intention, at least, of the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials of 1963–65 (which I occasionally attended because my mother was involved in taking care of survivor witnesses).⁵ But Jewishness referred to neither a living cultural identity nor the legacy of fractured biographies. This situation began to change only during the 1980s, after the broadcasting of the NBC miniseries Holocaust, with major retrospectives of Yiddish film in Frankfurt in 1980 and 1982; with the controversy surrounding Fassbinder’s play Garbage, the City and Death (1985); with the emergence of Jewish Groups at universities in Frankfurt and Berlin; and with the founding of the journal Babylon in 1986 (by, among others, Dan Diner, Gertrud Koch, and Cilly Kugelmann).⁶ For me, who had left Germany in 1977, it took living in the United States and encountering a Jewish culture that could be both secular and religious to recover that part of my history and identity.⁷

It is well known that cinema occupied a rather marginal place in Critical Theory, especially within the narrower circle of the Frankfurt School. Conversely, however, Critical Theory exerted a significant influence on film theory and criticism, as well as filmmaking and cinema politics. Adorno and Horkheimer’s critique of the capitalist culture industry—and Adorno’s continuation of that critique for the administrative cultural order of the Federal Republic⁸—was widely shared, yet led to different conclusions among those seeking to create and enable alternative forms of cinema, notably Kluge, and in debates conducted in journals such as Filmkritik and later the feminist journal Frauen und Film. When the writings of Benjamin and Kracauer were (re)discovered in the wake of the protest movements of 1968, the paradigm of the culture industry, renamed “consciousness industry,” had turned into a call to oppositional practice, and been radicalized with recourse to Brecht and Soviet avant-garde intellectuals such as Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, and Sergei Tretyakov.⁹ While Benjamin’s writings were championed in new-left magazines (in particular Alternative, which leveled charges of censorship against Adorno), his work quite early on entered academic disciplines, especially literature and philosophy. In contrast, the reception of Kracauer’s work until the 1980s remained largely extra-academic, limited to the genre of the Feuilleton, in which he himself had published the bulk of his Weimar writings (which does not diminish them into mere “journalism”).¹⁰

The reception of Kracauer’s writings on film can be considered a seismograph for the major fault lines in the development of West German discourse on film since 1968. The first collection of Kracauer’s film essays and reviews, Kino, published by Witte in 1974, opens with the programmatic piece “The Task of the Film Critic” (1932), whose most often quoted phrase—“the film critic worth his salt is conceivable only as a social critic”—was written under the threat of the Nazis’ rise to power.¹¹ At the same time, Kracauer’s Theory of Film, which had met with consternation or was largely ignored when first published in German in 1964, assumed an inspirational role a decade later when it was assimilated by the Munich movement of “Sensibilismus,” which galvanized around Wim Wenders’s writings and films such as Alice in the Cities (1974) and Kings of the Road (1976). This cineaste sensibility acclaimed films for “bringing the corporeal world into visibility,” celebrated the film experience qua experience, and pitted “looking” and “description” against “interpretation,” Marxist critique of ideology, and critical disagreement in conversations about film.¹² Needless to say, the polarization between social and political concerns on the one hand and aesthetic experience on the other was as reductive of Kracauer’s work, from early to late, as it was of efforts in the tradition of Critical Theory (Witte’s writings on film, indebted to Kracauer, being exemplary of these) to analyze formal-stylistic elements and aesthetic effects both in relation to and against the films’ economic and social dependencies.

The tension between political and aesthetic approaches to film, and between both of these and theoretically grounded efforts to mediate these approaches, became manifest as well in the feminist journal Frauen und Film. Founded in 1974 by filmmaker Helke Sander and closely entwined with the emergence of women’s cinema and the women’s movement, the journal published manifestos of feminist cinema; reviews of films by women as well as “women’s films” by their male auteur competitors; critical analyses of the conditions of production, distribution, and training for women filmmakers; and articles and interviews toward a genealogy of women directors, film workers, and critics. From 1977 on, with the increased participation of Frankfurt-based writers, in particular Koch and Heide Schlüpmann, the journal published several issues on topics such as feminist film theory, women’s cinema as counter-cinema, female spectators, the pornographic gaze, and eroticism. It was in these issues that the reception of psychoanalytic-semiotic film theory in its feminist, primarily Anglophone elaboration began (including reports about the “women’s event” at the 1979 Edinburgh film festival and translations of texts by Claire Johnston and Christine Gledhill), and that the paradigmatic impulses of this work, in particular Laura Mulvey’s groundbreaking essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” were absorbed, criticized, and pushed further. The point was not just to rehearse the apparatus-based critique of masculinist cinema but also to conceptualize female subjectivity in the cinema in terms other than absence and negativity; to offer accounts of cinematic pleasure that did not simply revolve around classical psychoanalytic categories of voyeurism, fetishism, and castration but that, within the larger framework of Critical Theory, had recourse to anthropology, phenomenology, and other discourses, as well as to early film history.¹³ These efforts had an enabling influence on my own work, beginning with my essay on Rudolph Valentino and female spectatorship, of which an early version appeared in Frauen und Film.

There was also a more general, if indirect, lineage between Frauen und Film and Critical Theory. The notion of women’s cinema as counter-cinema, and of a journal as a medium of organization, expression, critique, and debate, was part of a discourse—and a vital ensemble of practices—indebted to the idea of the public sphere, in particular alternative and oppositional forms of publicness. If Habermas’s book The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962) had been the basis for the militant demand for publicness (general access, transparency, discussion) so central to the protest movement around 1968, Negt and Kluge’s response to Habermas, Public Sphere and Experience (1972), became the key text for the new social movements of the 1970s (women’s and gay movements, urban grassroots organization, pedagogic and environmentalist causes, etc.). That book broadened Habermas’s category of the public from the formal conditions under which individuals could speak and act regardless of origin and status to a more comprehensive understanding of the public as a “social horizon of experience,” grounded in the subjects’ “context of living” (Lebenszusammenhang), that is, the lived relationality of social and material, affective and imaginative re/production.¹⁴

The concept of experience (Erfahrung) that Negt and Kluge invoked resonates deeply with the tradition of Critical Theory, especially its emphatic elaboration in the writings of Benjamin and Adorno. Even in its ordinary usage, the German term Erfahrung—with its etymological roots of fahren (riding, journeying, cruising) and Gefahr (danger, peril)—does not have as much of an empiricist connotation as its English counterpart, inasmuch as it stresses the subject’s precarious mobility rather than a stable position of perception vis-à-vis an object. Benjamin, theorizing the conditions of possibility of Erfahrung in modernity, had linked its historic decline with the proliferation of Erlebnis (immediate but isolated experience) under the conditions of industrial capitalism; in this context, Erfahrung crucially came to entail the capacity of memory—individual and collective, involuntary as well as cognitive—and the ability to imagine a different future.

For Negt and Kluge, writing at a time when experience had allegedly all but vanished, the fragmentation, alienation, and blockages of experience were themselves already part of experience (persisting despite lamentations of its decline), along with needs and fantasies in response to that condition. Hence they saw the political significance of the public as that of a social horizon or matrix in which individual lived experience could be recognized in its relationality and collective dimension, even as—and not least because—the dynamics of market-driven media worked to appropriate and abstract that experience. In his writings and films, Kluge offered a theory of cinema as a public sphere, with aesthetic devices that encouraged viewers to mobilize their own experience; at the same time, he situated the cinema in relation to a larger, heterogeneous and unstable public sphere in which traditional bourgeois forms of publicness were cohabitating and competing with those spawned and marketed by the new media (then referring to the increasingly privately owned electronic media).

Understanding the public in terms of this conceptualization of experience has been a guiding framework in my thinking about cinema, in particular early cinema and its relations to modernity. It has steered me toward questions concerning the relationship between institutional norms, like those associated with the classical Hollywood paradigm, and the unpredictable dynamics of mass-mediated publicness (as in the case of the Valentino craze). Today, I find Negt and Kluge’s insistence on the mixed, conjunctural, rapidly forming and disintegrating character of contemporary public spheres remarkably prescient as I am trying to understand the transformations of publicness and experience in the digitally based media environment—and the implications of these developments for cinema, film theory, and film history.

Sketching these intersections of Critical Theory and film, ones I consider important to the history of the present book, makes me keenly aware of the distance between American cinema studies circa 1980 and the sets of questions, concerns, and knowledges that had been part of my luggage.¹⁵ This was particularly the case with the concept of the public sphere, which I took to offer the possibility of mediating the textual and apparatus-based analysis of film with social, cultural, and political concerns, and of situating the history of formal-stylistic development in relation to the longer-term histories of modernization and modernity, including changes in gender roles and sexuality. But the word publicness was all but impossible to find in the academic’s dictionary, at least until the late 1980s when it burst onto the scene in a wide range of disciplines (e.g., anthropology, philosophy, history, area studies, literary studies) and discourses (e.g., postcolonial, feminist, gay and lesbian). The hesitation, even then, with which the concept entered cinema studies may have been due to the primary reliance of these debates on Habermas’s book, which is not particularly helpful when it comes to technologically mediated forms of publicness (besides, cultural studies seemed to offer a simpler, more easily adaptable alternative).

The broader reception of Critical Theory in English-language contexts, of course, dates back to the 1970s, thanks in large part to the scholarship of Fredric Jameson, Martin Jay, and Susan Buck-Morss. ¹⁶ And there was the phenomenal success of Benjamin’s work, beginning with Hannah Arendt’s edition of Benjamin’s Illuminations (1969), followed by Reflections (1978), which was perceived as a novel and different type of writing on literary and cultural objects. Benjamin’s famous essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproducibility” eventually entered the canon of classical film theory and, along with his writings on Baudelaire and the Arcades Project, became an important source for the exploration of early cinema’s relationship to modernity, as well as reflections on cinema and the postmodern.¹⁷

However, the bulk of commentary—exegesis, critique, transformation—of Critical Theory, including Benjamin, took place in the contexts of German Studies and of critical social and political theory, specifically in such journals as New German Critique and Telos. Founded in 1973, New German Critique (whose editorial board I joined in 1984) sought not only to make key texts available in translation and to situate them historically but also to develop the critical and cross-disciplinary impulses of that tradition for different times and a wider range of topics and fields, including the visual arts, cinema, and the new media. Following a double issue on New German Cinema (1981–82), we published a special issue on Weimar film theory (1987), which included essays by Tom Levin, Thomas Elsaesser, Schlüpmann, Koch, and Richard Allen. (It also included my first article on Benjamin, cinema, and experience, “The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology,” of which some remnants still haunt the present book.) In later years, there were special issues on Kluge, Kracauer, and Fassbinder; on Edgar Reitz’s Heimat; on Weimar mass culture, Nazi cinema, film and exile; and on postwall cinema and transnational cinemas; among others.

Beginning in the 1990s one could observe a more differentiated reception of Critical Theory in a range of fields, in particular literature, philosophy, and art. While this new wave of discovery owed much to the availability of more and better translations, it also had something to do with a renewed interest in aesthetics, which had been banished first by semiotics, then by new historicism and cultural studies. Benjamin offered a theory of aesthetics qua aisthesis, more comprehensive than a work’s formal and stylistic features, linked to his inquiry into the transformation of sensory perception and experience in modernity. Adorno’s microanalyses of literary and musical works demonstrated a dialectical mode of reading that took seriously these works’ claims to aesthetic autonomy while tracing socioeconomic dependency in their very negation of the empirical world. And Kracauer’s early writings on mass-cultural and urban phenomena combined an acuteness of aesthetic observation and description with a rhetorical practice of ambivalence, which in his late work evolved into a cognitive side-by-side principle. All three presented the reader with different modes of thinking, including speculative theorizing, and more literary styles of critical writing—marked by images, metaphors, wordplay, paradox, acrobatic sentence structures—that offered a relief from the poverty of much academic language.

But cinema studies, too, had been changing considerably. In 2002, aft er years of discussion about how to acknowledge television studies, the Society for Cinema Studies changed its name to the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. Closer to home, in 1998 the University of Chicago had established a Ph.D.-granting Committee for Cinema and Media Studies (an undergraduate program in CMS having existed since 1995), which in 2009 became a full-fledged department. In this instance, the name was meant to designate a broad diversity of media; to encourage critical inquiry into cinema’s interactions with other forms and institutions, artistic and vernacular, traditional and experimental; and thus to apprehend cinema in its intersections with (or disjuncture among) different histories, aesthetic and technological, social and political.

Given the academic expansion of the field, there no longer seems to be any ruling paradigm, but rather a plurality—and healthy eclecticism—of theories and methodologies, ranging from phenomenological to Deleuzian, Wittgensteinian, Cavellian, cinemetrical. If anything today makes the field coalesce it is the recognition (almost already a cliché) that, now that cinema studies is finally becoming a legitimate discipline in the humanities, its very object seems to be dissolving into a larger stream of—global and globalizing—audiovisual, electronic, digital, and web-based moving image culture. That cinema from its earliest days has survived, adapted, and metamorphosed in a competitive media environment is nothing new. But the vast proliferation of films across digital storage devices and distributed media, diverse platforms, and smaller and smallest screens has been challenging our assumptions about what we mean by cinema and the extent to which we delimit or open up the boundaries of its dispositif. This challenge has provoked a rethinking of key concepts that were more or less taken for granted, or at least were assumed to be central to classical film theory, such as medium specificity and photographic indexicality, and their significance to what we understand by realism; it has made us reconsider the importance of basic cinematic categories such as movement, animation, and life. Rather than a threat, I consider this a productive, energizing push for reopening ostensibly closed chapters of film theory, just as I believe that digital cinema, especially in its independent versions, will change the shape of past film history.

As far as the contemporary situation of cinema is concerned, we could find impulses in Kracauer’s and Benjamin’s efforts to understand the history of the present, or the present as history, and to imagine different futures whose potentialities may be buried in the past. At the very least, they could save us from cinephile nostalgia by turning our attention to the question of how films and the cinema experience relate to the ongoing, generationally marked reconfiguration of experience (in the full sense of Erfahrung) in daily life and social relations, in labor, the economy, and politics. By the same token, Adorno’s seemingly most paranoid, empirically based studies on the convergence of the different branches of the culture industry, especially radio and television, could be said to have been vindicated by subsequent developments, even prior to the emergence of globalized media networks and digitally amplified marketing and information culture.¹⁸ In that sense, they offer a sobering antidote to any facile optimism vis-à-vis media technology as such—regardless of its political, economic, and cultural usages— which often claims Benjamin as a precursor.

As a legacy to film and cinema theory at the current threshold(s) of moving image culture, I don’t think these writers contribute new ontologies. They were more interested in what cinema does, the kind of sensory-perceptual, mimetic experience it enabled, than in what cinema is. And whatever it was doing was too contingent upon institutional and social and political constellations to isolate ontological features of film, although Kracauer frequently gestured in that direction. They considered the cinema as part of an evolving phenomenology of modernity, and their interest was in the particular modalities of the nexus between cinema experience and the viewing public’s lived experience. Thus, when Benjamin attributes the popularity of the Mickey Mouse films to “simply the fact that the audience recognizes its own life in them,” he dismisses any direct, reflectionist representation of the audience’s mechanized working and living conditions and instead foregrounds the films’ expression of the collective experience of those conditions in terms of sensorily, bodily transmitted rhythms, hyperbolic humor, and fantasies of disruption and transformation.¹⁹ At stake here, too, is the possibility of aesthetic play (or “room-for-play”)—an idea shared by Kracauer but not Adorno—by which cinema not only trains viewers in a mimetic, nondestructive adaptation of technology but also offers the chance to defuse the pathological effects of an already failed technological adaptation. Not an ontology of film, then, but the apprehension of cinema’s place in a materialist phenomenology of the present, and a (still) startling appreciation of cinema’s possible role in effecting a not-yet-apprehensible future.

This book has been far too long in the making. I occasionally wondered whether I was working on Penelope’s web or a palimpsest. Some chapters began as articles in journals and other publications. With the exception of chapters 4 and 6, these articles have been substantially modified; some splinters, though, have made it even into the chapters written from scratch. In a number of cases, my views have changed over the years—changes not unrelated to the transformation of cinema as an institution and practice and the development of cinema and media studies as a field.

The book offers neither a complete nor representative survey. In the oeuvres of the three writers discussed, film commands attention in highly uneven proportions and intensities. It seems fair to say that Kracauer was the only regular moviegoer, with a thick knowledge of film history as it was evolving. Although cinema occupied a central place in Benjamin’s efforts to theorize the crossroads of modernity, he probably watched little more than the Soviet, Chaplin, and Disney films he wrote about (and, according to Gershom Scholem, films with Adolphe Menjou, about whom, to my knowledge, he did not write). And Adorno’s relationship with film, as Kluge once quipped, could be summed up in the phrase “I love to go to the cinema; the only thing that bothers me is the image on the screen”²⁰— though we now know that, especially during his exile in Santa Monica, he saw many more movies (in addition to his beloved Marx Brothers) than are mentioned in the chapter on the culture industry, and that he was involved in a number of film projects. Methodologically, this unevenness suggested extrapolating observations from texts by the three writers that are not primarily or explicitly concerned with film, which is how I had proceeded all along in my efforts to illuminate key concepts in the texts by them that are. One of my initial goals had been to put them in a conversation—conversations that actually took place, virtual conversations that could have occurred, and in the case of Adorno and Kracauer, conversations that had become ritualized exercises in talking past each other. I hope that my conversations with these writers will inspire readers to engage them in their own.

ChicagoNovember 2010