dynamics of split-second exposure, commodified presence effect, and archival aft erlife. The encounter with aged photographs does not put the beholder in touch with a reality repressed by scientific reason and capitalist appropriation, let alone with nature, but rather with the historical reality of irreducible mediation and alienation.
Kracauer’s investment in photographic negativity is fueled by photography’s potential to point up the disintegration of traditional and reinvented unities, the arbitrariness of social and cultural arrangements at the level of both the individual image and the protocols of public media. Once the bonds that sustained the memory image are no longer given, the task of artistic and critical practice is “to establish the provisional status of all given configurations.” Kracauer finds a model of writing that “demolishes natural reality and displaces the fragments against each other” (MO 62; S 5.2:97) in the works of Franz Kafka, whose novel The Castle he had reviewed enthusiastically a year earlier.116 If that review reads like a blueprint for Kracauer’s early gnostic-modernist theory of film, the photography essay makes this connection explicit. By putting techniques of framing and editing to defamiliarizing effect (associating “parts and segments to create strange figurations”), film has the capacity not only to make evident the “disorder of the detritus reflected in photography” by suspending “every habitual relationship among the elements of nature,” but also to “stir up,” to mobilize and reconfigure those elements (MO 62–63; S 5.2:97). Combining photographic contingency with cinematic montage, film can “play” with “the pieces of disjointed nature” in a manner “reminiscent of dreams“ (MO 63). In other words, similar to the oneiric imbrication of the remains of the most recent and ordinary with the hidden logic of the unconscious, film could animate and reassemble the inert, mortified fragments of photographic nature to suggest the possibility of a different history.
Although film becomes the overt object of Kracauer’s reflections only at the end, the whole essay is central to his emerging film theory, if not conceived from this vantage point.117 In that sense, it provides the foundation for his later effort, in Theory of Film, to ground a “material aesthetics” of the cinema in the photographic basis of film. In that text, the earlier essay remains curiously unmentioned, perhaps relegated to forgetting by the catastrophic defeat in modernity’s hitherto most extreme gamble. Nonetheless, as I argue in chapter 9, whatever cinema’s potential for “the redemption of physical reality,” Kracauer’s advocacy of realism in the later book remains tied to a historical understanding of physis and a concept of reality that depends as much on the estranging and metamorphic effects of cinematic representation as on the role of the viewer. As the photography essay makes sufficiently clear, Kracauer’s conception of film’s relationship with photography is not grounded in any simple or “naive” referential realism. On the contrary, it turns on film’s ability to mobilize and play with the reified, unmoored, multiply mediated fragments of the modern physis, a historically transformed world that includes the viewer as materially contingent, embodied subject. The concept of realism at stake is therefore less a referential than an experiential one, predicated on the encounter with that world under radically changed and changing conditions of referentiality.
Kracauer does not posit the relationship between photography and film in evolutionary terms, but seeks to articulate an aesthetic of film in the interstices of the two media. In this intermedial space, film does not “remediate” photography by way of containing it;118 rather, photography, running alongside and intersecting with film both institutionally and ideologically, provides radical possibilities that film can draw on. To the convergence of film and photography in contemporary capitalist media culture—as prefigured in the cognitive regime that links weekly newsreels and illustrated magazines, and as metonymically present in the photograph of the film star—he opposes an alternative configuration of intermedial relations in which the unstable specificity of one medium works to cite and interrogate the other.119
Around the time the photography essay was written, the kind of film it envisioned may not have existed, though there are clearly affinities with experimental films of the period (e.g., René Clair, Jean Vigo, Dziga Vertov, and Kinugasa Teinsuke, all of whom Kracauer reviewed). By and large, contemporary commercial cinema had no use for the defamiliarizing and disjunctive aesthetics projected in the essay. Kracauer was well aware that, with the stabilization of German film production from 1925 on and mounting political instability toward the end of the decade, critical reviewing required a more direct language than that indebted to photographic negativity or, for that matter, to material expression of Weltzerfall and hyperbolic distortion of distorted conditions. A signal juncture in this regard, preceding the photography essay, was his intervention in the political controversies surrounding the 1926 German release of Battleship Potemkin.120 Defending Eisenstein’s film against the charge of Tendenzkunst (art with a message), Kracauer’s decisive review of Potemkin brings together aesthetic criteria developed in his early writings on film—the restriction to physical exteriority appropriate to the medium, an associative fantasy (“filled with indignation, terror, and hope”) that guides the sequencing of optical impressions, and a fairy-tale ending—with an enthusiastic endorsement of the “truth” presented by the film, its dealing with a “real” subject such as “the struggle of the oppressed against the oppressors” and “the moment of the revolution.”121 He praises the film’s engagement with the real not least because it highlights, by contrast, the regressive and escapist bent of capitalist film production that takes on inequality, injustice, poverty, and revolt only to the extent that their representation does not threaten the dominant social order.122
The positivization of truth and concretization of the social reality that film can and should confront mark a shift in Kracauer’s writing toward a more immanent, politically grounded critique of ideology that takes aim at the films’ recycling of outdated bourgeois forms, settings, and values, the gentrification of exhibition practices, and the shaping of a mass-cultural imaginary in collusion with the emerging white-collar class. Increasingly, his critique of these developments tends to imply a betrayal of cinema’s anarchic and materialist legacy: its beginnings in the habitat of popular entertainments and dime novels; its capacity to register and advance the disintegration and transformation of the phenomenal world. Kracauer invokes this forgotten potential both as a critical standard for the present and as a promise that the discarded possibilities of film history could yet become decisive for the cinema’s future.
In its inscription of the technological media as a historic gamble, the photography essay highlights an important dynamic in Kracauer’s early work on film and mass culture, which at once dates it and makes it prescient. For its radicalism still participates in the 1920s’ break with the “long nineteenth century,” a century prolonged by efforts, enhanced by the capitalist entertainment industry, to restore a cultural façade that Kracauer, like the avant-garde artists of his time, strongly believed could not be patched up. Moved by a modernist impulse that made him defend the cinema against the educated bourgeoisie, he found in the technological mass media a sensory-perceptual discourse on a par with the experience of modernity, encompassing its traumatic, pathological effects as well as its transformational, emancipatory possibilities. Accordingly, the essay discerned in technologically and mass-based media institutions like the illustrated journals and cinema the emergence of new forms of publicness (different from the traditional liberal public sphere of the newspaper, to whose readers it was addressed) that demanded recognition and critical debate, insisting that these new publics were key to the political future of Weimar modernity.
Beyond its prognostic purchase on the imminent future, the photography essay contains a remarkably acute premonition that the issue was not merely that a discourse equal to the challenges of modernity was lacking—a lack to which film and photography supplied a certain answer—but that these same media generated and circulated an exponentially increased abundance of images, a random multiplicity and an indifferent interchangeability and convergence. It thus anticipates a key feature of contemporary media culture, in a changed socioeconomic and geopolitical landscape, to be sure, and in new, infinitely more powerful technological forms.
