in which he describes a tour through the backlots of the UFA studio in Neubabelsberg.38 Marveling at the vast array of fragmentary sets and props that defy natural interconnections and proportions (including sets for well-known films like Fritz Lang’s Nibelungen and Metropolis and F. W. Murnau’s Faust), he highlights the fact that, to produce the effect of a coherent diegetic world in a film, the world is first cut to pieces. “This dismantling of the world’s contents is radical; and even if it is undertaken for the sake of illusion, the illusion is by no means insignificant” (MO 281–82). With obvious irony yet also wide-eyed delight, he evokes the mortification and disorganization of the seemingly natural world—the surreal assembly of the “ruins of the universe . . . representative samples of all periods, peoples, and styles,” inventoried and stored in warehouses (MO 282)—in terms that resonate with his essay “Photography” of the following year. Similarly, if less explicitly, “Calico-World” links the paradoxical relation between fragmentation and diegetic unity to the historical dialectics of nature, arrested in the appearance of the social order as natural. Classical cinema perpetuates this appearance through its adaptation of bourgeois aesthetic principles, such as theatrical illusionism based on the invisible boundary between viewer and the fictional space of the proscenium stage. The director has the task to organize “the visual material—which is as beautifully disorganized as life itself—into the unity that life owes to art” (MO 288; W 6.1:197). By means of continuity editing and intertitles he turns the “huge chaos” into a “little whole: a social drama, a historical event, a woman’s fate.” Tongue-in-cheek, Kracauer acknowledges that most of the time the desired effect is achieved: “One believes in the fourth wall. Everything guaranteed nature” (MO 288).
Kracauer’s interest in forms of cinematic expression that exceed narrative motivation and integration is coupled with a more porous conception of spectatorship. In a review of a film by E. A. Dupont, for instance, Kracauer singles out ephemeral interludes—“little entrefilets”—not only for the digressive glimpses they afford but also for the way their arrangement appeals to the viewer: “The sequencing of shots is exemplary: the alternation of close-ups, optical fragments, transitions, and master shots leads the imagination [Phantasie] up kaleidoscopic mountains.”39 Even as these montage sequences serve to evoke the “desired atmosphere,” the notion of propelling the viewer’s imagination into kaleidoscopic gyrations is quite distinct from the effects of diegetic absorption, illusionist mastery, or, for that matter, hypothesis-forming attention that have been attributed to classical narrative.40 It rather suggests a centrifugal movement away from the film—toward a more autonomous agency that Alexander Kluge was to call “the film in the spectator’s head,” the disavowed source of experience, of the social wealth of fantasies, wishes, daydreams, and associations appropriated by commercial cinema.41
At certain moments, Kracauer’s enthusiasm for nondramatic optical delights betrays less the disposition of an anticlassical critic than that of a preclassical moviegoer, which Tom Gunning has described as an “aesthetic of astonishment.”42 Until he developed a more critical stance toward the ideology of so-called “nature films” and travelogues (from about 1926 on), Kracauer relished their strange and marvelous sights in a manner harking back to early cinema when scenics and travel films were highly popular genres and landscape views were perceived as attractions in their own right.43 Thus, he often singled out “nature scenes” and other views of touristic appeal, even in films that he rejected on aesthetic and political grounds (e.g., shots of Venice in The Merchant of Venice).44
It is in this vein that we have to read his initial enthusiasm for the so-called mountain films, the genre that made Leni Riefenstahl and Luis Trenker famous and that, in Kracauer’s later critique, promoted a mixture of heroic idealism, immaturity, and “antirationalism on which the Nazis could capitalize.”45 As late as 1925, Arnold Fanck’s Der Berg des Schicksals (The Mountain of Fate, 1924) moves Kracauer to this enraptured account:
More important than the plot with its beneficial solution are the magnificent nature views [herrliche Naturaufnahmen] which were taken under the most difficult circumstances during months of patient persistence. The rock formations of the Dolomites—Cimone della Pala, Latemar, Rosengarten, whatever their names may be— stretch toward the sky under every conceivable kind of lighting, they are reflected in the lakes and surrounded by agglomerations of clouds: cumulus clouds, giant cloud massifs that are fraying, oceans of clouds that ebb and flow, striped drifts and flocks of cirrus clouds. They rush close faster than in reality, cheated out of their duration by time-lapse photography. They shroud the peaks, encircle them, and briefly desist from their siege: a kaleidoscopic spectacle, always the same and ever new. Rarely has one seen in a film such heavenly scenes; their curious fascination above all derives from the fact that processes which in nature take hours to unfold are here presented in a few minutes. The cloud events concentrate and the distortion of time creates a delightful optical intoxication. 46
The concluding remark recommending the film to as many viewers as possible— “it shows the impassioned community between human beings and nature from a peculiar angle”—would have been highly unlikely only a few years later. Not only did Kracauer amplify the negative connotations in his concept of nature on philosophical and political grounds (as in the essay “The Mass Ornament”), but he also embarked on impassioned expeditions into urban modernity and came to prefer the artifices of second nature over the increasingly abused mystique of the first—which he discerned, among other things, in the proliferation of vernacular imagery of the Alps (see chapter 2).
The “optical intoxication” or fascination Kracauer pinpoints in his viewing experience of the mountain film has its referent less in the sights of an ostensibly more primary nature than, more generally, in the cinema’s technical ability to render the world of “things,” a designation at once more opaque and in excess of the qualities that define material objects in quotidian usage.47 While he still excoriates modern science for promoting a “loss of our relation to things” (as in his obituary on Rudolf Steiner, FZ 18 April 1925), he discovers in film and particular kinds of film practice a way to recover, transform, and reanimate the world of things, in modes of consciousness not unrelated to dreams and involuntary memories.48 Film is capable not only of rendering objects in their material thingness and plasticity, bringing them into visibility, but also of giving the presumably dead world of things a form of speech. Reviewing an adaptation of an Andersen fairy tale, Kracauer attributes this effect to the role of movement and mobility—through techniques of framing, staging, lighting, editing—in translating the plot “into a sequence of light and shadows, a rondo of figures in the snow, a silent scurrying and flitting on stairs and along bridge railings, a rhythmic condensation of all visibilities which begin to speak without words.”49
By foregrounding the material qualities of objects through cinematic techniques, film has the capacity to reveal things in their habitual, subconscious interdependence with human life, to capture in them the traces of social, psychic, erotic relations. Reviewing Jacques Feyder’s (lost) film Thérèse Raquin (1928), Kracauer extols the film’s representation of the petty-bourgeois Paris apartment, “which is populated by ghosts. . . . Every piece of furniture is charged with the fates that unfurled here in the past. There is the double bed, the high armchair, the silver dishes—all these things have the significance of witnesses: they are palpably infused with human substance and now they speak, often better than human beings might speak. In hardly any film—except for the Russian films—has the power of dead things been forced to the surface as actively and densely as here.”50 Kracauer describes an aesthetic quality that Benjamin, in his defense of Battleship Potemkin, had referred to as a “conspiratorial relationship between film technique and milieu” (a quality he was soon to elaborate in terms of the concept of the “optical unconscious”)—except that in Kracauer’s account of Thérèse Raquin the oppressiveness of the petty-bourgeois interior predominates over the liberatory energies emphasized by Benjamin.51
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