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
