exile, both the perspective of transformation and the dimension of critical affiliation have disappeared. In the Caligari book, Grune’s film is dismissed as a “nonpolitical avant-garde product.” The film, Kracauer explains, had a considerable success: “it ingratiated itself with a rather broad public composed mainly of intellectuals.” While he still praises the “realistic” effort in the everyday quality of the (studio) setting, the film now figures as an allegory for the regressive movement from rebellion to submission. Its wandering protagonist is reduced to a social type, a philistine acting out historically specific—and in retrospect, politically fatal—psychological mechanisms.25 With this analysis, not only has Kracauer shifted frames, from a metaphysics of modernity to a critique of ideology, but he has also disavowed his own earlier fascination with the film, his critical identification with the experience of the doubly exiled wanderer.
But not every film that received his stamp of approval did so because it could be construed as an expression of metaphysical malaise or “transcendental homelessness.” On the contrary, many reviews written between 1923 and 1926 disclose a discriminating engagement with the actual film practice that unfurled on Frankfurt screens, a remarkable attention to the diversity of genres, modes of representation, and spectatorial effects. To be sure, Kracauer’s stance remains normative throughout (there was probably never a time when he was not to some extent normative, whether in the name of a lapsarian philosophy of history or a politics of realism); still, the terms and criteria he puts into play cast a fairly wide net. The result is a canon that seems to be at odds, in part at least, with the “realist” standards of his later writings. Echoing Lukács’s praise for film’s imbrication of strictly nature-bound reality with the “fantastic,” Kracauer emphasizes cinematic effects of “unreality” and “improbability,” the “miraculous,” “marvelous,” and “grotesque”;26 he delights in moments of “kaleidoscopic” vision, “chance,” “improvisation,” and “mobility.” Accordingly, he favors such genres as thrillers and adventure dramas revolving around detectives, impostors, and the circus; animated and trick photography; fairy tales; and slapstick comedy or any form of high-speed physical farce.
What these reviews amply document is that Kracauer considers film’s historic chance to truthfully express its time to be as much a matter of aesthetic choice as of structural affinities between cinematic technique and contemporary experience. The point is not just to mirror the world that is, literally, going to pieces but to advance that process. If anything, this demands a mode of representation decidedly antinaturalist. Praising an animated short of Munich scenes, Kracauer writes: “Its improbability, which runs counter to any naturalism, fully corresponds to the essence of film which after all, if it is to achieve its very specificity, has to completely break apart the natural contexts of our lives.”27 Similarly, he commends a fantastic drama about a missing lottery ticket for making happen “what has to happen in film: the continual transformation of the external world, the crazy displacement of its objects [die verrückte Verrückung ihrer Objekte].”28
One strategy of displacement and transformation is the “bracketing” of the represented world by means of irony, hyperbole, satire, or caricature—that is, by the supplementary logic of a “distortion of distortion” that we have seen in his analysis of the circus clowns. On the occasion of an adventure drama set in a cosmopolitan, high-tech milieu of generic Anglo-American origins, Kracauer asserts: “Genuine film drama has the task of rendering ironic the phantomlike quality of our life by exaggerating its unreality and thus to point toward true reality.” The hyperbolic doubling of modern surface life promotes a demolition and transcendence of that world by way of humor. A “deeper meaning” of this “amusing joke” is that it “reveals the nothingness of a world that lets itself be set in motion over a nothing and provokes laughter over its previously detoxified seriousness.”29
Kracauer’s preference for films that, in his reading, hyperbolize contemporary reality’s “unreality” is rooted in the historico-philosophical assumption that modernity could and would ultimately be overcome, that a different life, the “true reality” that was now absent and inaccessible, was still conceivable beyond the present state. The utopian residue in Kracauer’s thinking during this period accounts for his early endorsement of the fairy tale film, a genre in which “film has conquered a domain that fully belongs to it.”30 Because of its liberation from the norms of verisimilitude, the fairy tale provides a modality that allows us “to get to a happy ending without lying” (Alexander Kluge),31 a utopian moment under erasure that, as Kracauer will elaborate a few years later with regard to Chaplin, nonetheless radiates with visions of justice and peace. Much as the substance of the ending matters, Kracauer seems interested in the fairy tale as a mode of all-but-impossible imagining, a way to uphold the longing for a different world in the face of overwhelming facticity. In his enthusiastic review of Murnau’s Der letzte Mann (The Last Laugh, 1924), he defends the film against critics’ objections to the tacked-on happy ending—“a fairy tale–like postlude [Nachspiel] which is so unbelievable that you may just believe it.” Chance alone, thanks to the “providential intervention of the ironic author,” can raise the “last man” (Emil Jannings’s demoted hotel porter) to the position of the “first,” and his random inheritance enables him to dispense temporary economic justice in the phantom world (Scheinwelt) of the Hotel Atlantic.32 If anything, by Kracauer’s standards, the film’s ending is not fantastic enough: “The epilogue would have to have been rendered even more unreal and playful for it to appear as the fairy tale–like anticipation of a different world.” In the Caligari book, he still calls the film’s unlikely happy ending an “ingenious” conclusion, but interprets it as “a nice farce jeering at the happy ending typical of the American film.”33
Whatever disjuncture there may be between Kracauer’s early preferences for particular styles and genres and his later judgments, his disapproval of certain types of film crystallizes quite early on and remains rather persistent throughout his life. The titles he reviews in the key of ironically amused to caustic critique usually belong to genres such as literary or theatrical adaptations, mythological or historical spectacles, and “society films” (Gesellschaftsfilme). A review of The Merchant of Venice (1923), for instance, criticizes the film in terms of qualities that violate the “spirit of film”: “instead of grotesque surface, false profundity of soul; instead of surprise improvisations, carefully prepared scenes.”34 Thus, in the practice of daily reviewing, especially of culturally prestigious productions, he formulates and recalibrates an aesthetics of film that seems to turn on assumptions about medium specificity.
If there is a common denominator to the films and genres Kracauer criticizes, it is their strict adherence to principles of the classical narrative film, which means the stylistic system formulated most clearly and hegemonically in American cinema from the 1910s on but emerging as well, in alternative forms and with delay, in other national cinemas.35 The classical system is defined, roughly, by principles of thorough causal motivation, mostly centering on the psychology and actions of individual characters, linear and unobtrusive narration, verisimilitude, intelligibility, and compositional unity—principles that ensure the effect of a coherent and closed diegesis, or fictional world of the film, to which the viewer has access as an invisible guest. In contrast to the well-made plots of classical films, Kracauer prefers narratives whose motivation is loose (unsolid) and defies academic logic (Schullogik), narratives that have “neither beginning nor end.”36 He finds this counterlogic at work in the seriality of American slapstick comedy, as a defining characteristic of that genre; by 1925, he frequently extols, in an almost ritualistic gesture, the comic shorts in the surrounding program as a relief from and antidote to the pretensions of the dramatic feature. But he also praises non comedic narrative films (including Hollywood features) constructed loosely enough to leave space for relatively independent details—epiphanies, episodes, elements of performance and improvisation. And he increasingly pinpoints conditions and practices of exhibition that either advance or restrict the range of improvisation and chance in the way films are experienced in the theater.37
