Siegfried Kracauer

Italy’s most successful ballet of the late-nineteenth century was Luigi Manzotti and Romualdo Marenco’s _Excelsior_ (1881). Its subject was the technological progress of modern times; its principal characters were allegories of “Civilization” and “Obscurantism,” which featured alongside further nonhuman actors such as the steam engine and manmade electricity.

Yet _Excelsior_’s projected meanings evolved throughout the 19th-century. A marionette production opened in 1884, its emphasis on the accurate reproduction of dance gestures, as well as on the music’s powers to kindle lifelike animation. Other modifications followed in subsequent revivals: at La Scala in 1909, the ballet was updated to incorporate the airplane and cinema, even though faithfulness to Manzotti’s original choreography remained crucial. More significantly, in 1913 the same production was made into a film, billed at the time as a novel experiment in _cine-fono-coreografia_ (this has recently been restored at Rome’s Cineteca Nazionale, with Marenco’s music re-synchronized to the moving image). The film offers a rare glimpse of nineteenth-century ballet in motion, as well as raising new questions about audiovisual interplay and the cultural interpretation of gesture.

My paper traces a twin concern with technological progress and the reproduction of gesture in _Excelsior_’s reception history from its premiere into the early-twentieth century. Drawing above all on writings stemming from Siegfried Kracauer’s canonical essay “The Mass Ornament,” which argued that contemporary dance reflected modern factory conditions along the production line, I argue for a political approach to the analysis of gesture: one that aims to reestablish a persistent link between _Excelsior_’s bodily movements and its technological ideology.

This article traces the motif of ruination in the cinema to theorize the specific affinity between ruins and the medium of film. Drawing on André Bazin's notion of a cinematic "Nero Complex," as well as on Siegfried Kracauer's realist theory of film and Georg Simmel's theory of the ruin, it locates the link between ruins and cinema in their shared function as repositories of historical time.

Es geht um politische Filmtheorie, im Ansatz zum/am/mit Mainstream-Film. Im Fokus liegt die Bildwerdung, Wahrnehmbarkeit, Erfahrbarkeit der Möglichkeiten, Praktiken, auch Hindernisse, von Subjekt- und Allianzbildungen, die unvorhergesehen, gegenhegemonial, dissensdemokratisch sind. Ausgangspunkt ist die Frage: Unter welchen Voraussetzungen denken politische Filmtheorien utopisch? Welchen Preis hat ihr Einsatz des Konzepts oder Imaginariums "Utopie" (oder ähnlich starker Ladung)? Der Preis einer Utopik radikaler Brüche mit kapital vermachteter Gegenwart kann im Anrufen eines Heils im Film-Denken bestehen. Das Heil liegt dann in der Welt ohne Menschen oder im Glauben ohne Welt-Bild bei Deleuze; in Reinigung der Form aus Treue zur Idee bei Badiou; im Übersetzen von Politik in Kunst bei Rancière; oder – zwei messianisch-utopistische Klassiker – im Vorausphantasieren eines "Goldgrundes der Utopie" bei Bloch oder im "Utopia of the in-between" bei Kracauer. Jedoch: Kracauers Name für das, was Film und Geschichte wahr-nehmen lassen, ist nicht reduzierbar auf ein Ethos des Mikro-Partikularen. Vielmehr wäre, vermittels Film als site of insight, Kracauers Anmutung von Entgründung im Sozialen, seine Loch-Utopik also, mit einem Label zu verknüpfen, das etwa bei Rancière auftaucht: Mit der "Atopie" kriegen wir ein bissl Politik am Film ohne Vollkommenheitsvoraussetzungen. Die atopische Versetzung wäre auch noch auf sich selbst, auf ihr eigenes Pathos der Nicht-Position, anzuwenden; und es wäre im Atopischen das Moment der (kritischen, strittigen, solidarischen) Setzung festzuhalten. Die Störung am Polizei-Ort des Gesetzes wäre zu verbinden mit schwachen Ge-Setzungen und deren Sinn für Rechtsansprüche, zumal entgegen rassistischer Normalisierung. Dasselbe anders, in Nonsense-Bildform, zeigt uns – zeige ich mit – Simon Pegg als Hauptdarsteller und Co-Autor der britischen Comedies Hot Fuzz und The World´s End von 2007 und 2013 (Regie jeweils Edgar Wright).

In the aftermath of the US-led ‘global war on terror’, emerging weaponised media of warfare present new means for the military ‘policing’ of populations. Algorithmic modes of observation are applied for the identification of targets, presenting an ‘aerial view’ that is no longer confined to optical media alone, but seeks out the criminogenic patterns and schemas that arise from human populations, or rather their double – the data masses. This article is concerned with the role of the emerging media function of militarised ‘pattern-of-life analysis’ in producing a specific perception of the mass that connects with older notions of masses and populations, as well as with a discourse on the changing nature of warfare. In what ways do the emerging media of observation and targeting of drone warfare contribute to the formation of new relations of visibility, and what does it mean for these media to become ‘weaponised’?

Published online before print October 19, 2016
In: Media, Culture and Society, Special Issue: The Media and the Military, January 2017.

The year 1926 marked the passage of Germany’s Law to Protect
Youth from Worthless and Obscene Publications. In combination
with the Reich Motion Picture Law of 1920, this legislation
sought to shelter minors from the corrupting forces of cultural
narrative and imagery. As the discourse surrounding these laws
attests, the terms of Germany’s so-called ‘cinema debate’ were
ambivalent, and discussions about fi lms thematizing crime were
especially complex. Whereas many detective and crime fi lms
were condemned for glorifying delinquency, brutalizing the senses
and exposing youth to excessive details about criminal activity,
educational fi lms and fi lms that sounded a warning were viewed
by reformists as ideal means to teach moral responsibility and
good citizenship. This paper explores the purported connection
between visual imagery, sensual–psychological stimulation, crime

Kracauer’s rehabilitation in the 1990s sidelined his Marxist framework of the middle-to-late Weimar era in favour of the then still dominant if decaying paradigms of post-structuralism and post-modernism. It was also silent on the relationship between Kant and Marxism in Kracauer’s work. This essay addresses these weaknesses by arguing that Kracauer transcoded the structure of Kant’s’ ‘problematic’ around reification into a Marxist framework in the middle-to-late Weimar period. The essay considers how Kracauer conceived the mass ornament (photography and film especially) as a site of reification and critical pedagogy. It explores his strategies of de-reification and their overlap with Walter Benjamin and the ruptures and continuities between the radical Weimar work and his later Theory of Film. The essay argues that the Theory of Film can be better understood as a transcoding of Kant’s philosophy of the aesthetic in the third Critique into the film camera itself, although the Marxian framework of the Weimar period is now considerably attenuated.

How do cinematic portrayals of the weather reflect and affect our experience of the world? While weatherly predictability and surprise can impact our daily experience, the history of cinema attests to the stylistic and narrative significance of snow, rain, wind, sunshine, clouds, and skies. Through analysis of films ranging from The Wizard of Oz to The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, from Citizen Kane to In the Mood for Love, Kristi McKim calls our attention to the ways that we read our atmospheres both within and beyond the movies.

Building upon meteorological definitions of weather's dynamism and volatility, this book shows how film weather can reveal character interiority, accelerate plot development, inspire stylistic innovation, comprise a momentary attraction, convey the passage of time, and idealize the world at its greatest meaning-making capacity (unlike our weather, film weather always happens on time, whether for tumultuous, romantic, violent, suspenseful, or melodramatic ends).

Akin to cinema's structuring of ephemera, cinematic weather suggests aesthetic control over what is fleeting, contingent, wildly environmental, and beyond human capacity to tame. This first book-length study of such a meteorological and cinematic affinity casts film weather as a means of artfully and mechanically conquering contingency through contingency, of taming weather through a medium itself ephemeral and enduring.

Using film theory, history, formalist/phenomenological analysis, and eco-criticism, this book casts cinema as weather, insofar as our skies and screens become readable through our interpretation of changing phenomena.

Contemporary eco-docs are never fully in control of the ‘sights of refuse’ that they show us. Toxicity and its resistance to representation only amplify the threats to stabilised meaning posed by the document. In many instances, the toxic image reveals just how conceptually ill-equipped these documentaries are for describing the post-industrial realities of our physical world. These documentaries also admit, willingly or not, that they cannot delimit the toxic through the image. Is it then the case that the toxic establishes itself cinematically in spite of what is intended? Or does the toxic continue to evade filmic representation?

Nuri Bilge Ceylan is a puzzling filmmaker who started his career as a photographer and initially made films with a "photographic" spirit. But from his first films known as the Trilogy of Province to his award winning latest feature Winter Sleep, Ceylan has changed drastically. Once a modest artist refusing to give interviews, Ceylan has become a regular "red carpet" figure. So this essay will analyze Ceylan's Winter Sleep from a critical theoretical perspective and try to underline the changes in his cinematography as well as philosophical orientations since his Trilogy of Province. The main points of argument will focus on his shift from an affirmative politics of "ambiguity" towards a dark postmodern "nothingness".

Prenant au sérieux le caractère référentiel et automatique du mode d’objectivation du réel par la caméra, André Bazin a fixé l’idée que le cinéma est un art absolument réaliste qui nous débarrasse de l’expression de l’artiste, des effets de style et de l’ennui d’une histoire à raconter. Mais une telle conception n’allait pas sans ambiguïtés et partis pris embarrassants. D’une part, puisque l’esthétique se déduisait des propriétés techniques, ce n’est qu’en restant fidèle à la spécificité de son medium que le film est capable de laisser venir le monde « tel qu’en lui-même », c’est-à-dire « objectivement ». D’autre part, à considérer l’ensemble de la production, il était nécessaire de créer une opposition artificielle entre les cinéastes formalistes qui manipulent et reconstruisent le réel par un enchaînement d’actions indigne, et les cinéastes de la présence brute chez qui l’inscription sensible du corps filmé révèle une puissance propre indépendante du montage. Comment rendre compte de cette apparente aversion de Bazin à toute marque de style un peu appuyée, voire à ce qui semble constituer les gestes fondamentaux d’un cinéaste : narrer, relier, couper, coller, éditer, se rapprocher ? Contre l’explication répandue qui ne tient naïvement compte que des présupposés modernistes sur l’enregistrement et de l’épiphanie des « faits bruts » que le film est censé procurer, il est soutenu que Bazin n’a pas conçu le réalisme comme la possibilité du cinéma de transmettre la consistance spatio-temporelle du monde. Son problème ne porte que marginalement sur l’ontologie de l’image analogique et concerne davantage l’attitude du cinéaste face à un medium qui a des affinités spécifiques vis-à-vis du réel. Car si l’œil mécanique est capable de tout capturer, cette incorporation du monde par la caméra atteste aussi une forme de violence proprement cinématographique. Quel est le critère possible pour une pertinence politique d’une image cinématographique ? Y a-t-il un standard non-subjectif qui fonde la différence entre les films abjects et les films acceptables ? En dernière instance, puisque la caméra prélève des fragments hors du réel, l’image filmique n’est-elle pas nécessairement réification obscène, extorsion cruelle et arbitraire ? Après une étude préalable des aspects technique, idéologique et artistique de l’esthétique réaliste, il apparaîtra que la théorie de Bazin est plus correctement exprimée en tant qu’une demande pour un positionnement moral du cinéaste qui juge ce qu’il filme et qui devrait être jugé d’après la façon dont il juge. Redoublé avec les arts « mécaniques » qui ont affaire – techniquement – au réel, il y a le sentiment qu’il ne faut pas prendre à la légère la responsabilité d’un homme envers les images qu’il crée. En traitant le problème en termes politiques, plutôt que techniques ou formels, il deviendra possible de révéler en quoi Bazin a établi l’idée qui fait autorité dans l’esthétique filmique, selon laquelle « juste une image » doit aussi être une image de « justice et justesse ». L’exigence du réalisme n’est alors rien d’autre chez lui que l’exigence pour l’artiste de l’ère moderne de ne pas nuire avec ses images, c’est-à-dire de faire l’épreuve du négatif dans laquelle la caméra cogne contre un réel qui résiste, insiste. Ainsi, la tâche du cinéaste est d’être un guetteur, un veilleur sur un monde qu’on doit supposer non-totalisable et irréductible à sa captation.

The three structuring topics of this chapter
will be the relationship between art and technology
in the work of the Frankfurt School,
including the notion of art as itself a type
of technology; repetition as a dynamic in
the field of art, and as a cultural logic more
broadly, with reference to associated notions
such as aura, singularity, and reproduction;
and the currency of central categories of the
critique of political economy, such as use
value and exchange value, for the field of
artistic production in capitalist society.

To speak of music as ineffable is to invoke a prevalent musical ideology.  For many musicians and listeners, the clichés still ring true.  Phrases like “music starts where language fails” reflect deeply-held beliefs, forming the raison d’être for music all told.  Yet we also know that such ideologies have histories and contexts.  Music historians have long noted the absence of such familiar tropes before the nineteenth century.  Ethnomusicologists can easily furnish examples of contrasting musical ideologies in other cultures.  Moreover, many late twentieth and twenty-first century composers and musicians have distanced themselves from such old-fashioned statements.  We ought, it seems, to be able to acknowledge the musical ineffable as ideologically true – as a construction crucial to the insights and appreciations of many musicians and listeners – while simultaneously recognizing that it is not an inherent musical truth.

To that end, I propose that we reframe the ineffable as a contingent ideology – a powerful force within certain historical and cultural circumstances, but by no means the only option.  In this article, I offer a case study in the history of the contingency of musical ineffability.  More specifically, I suggest ways in which this ideology was an inevitable by-product of the material culture of the nineteenth century.  My purposefully mismatched pair of examples comes from Second Empire Paris.  I see in the bouffonnerie of Jacques Offenbach and the rêverie inspired by Richard Wagner two expressions of a single cultural trope: that sound (including musical sound) is in itself nonsensical, and that it can be read in ways that resist established patterns of meanings.  Bouffonnerie and rêverie both result from reading music against the grain of widely recognized interpretive norms.  Offenbach’s operettas invited listeners to rethink standardized musical associations; Richard Wagner’s music similarly inspired the most fervent reactions in those critics like Charles Baudelaire who resisted the familiar interpretive tropes of Parisian opera and sought to understand these music dramas in new terms.  In both cases, the ineffable emerges from a failure of an interpretive norm, thus placing the experience of music “beyond language” – which is to say, beyond the prevailing mechanisms for reading and understand music.  There was, to be sure, a political component to such subversive readings.  Yet the underlying assumption of music as legible text depends on the presence of interpretive norms.  And the prevalence of these norms depends, in turn, on the media that convey them.  Thus, the stronger the material presence of texts that establish interpretive codes, the stronger the force of the ineffable becomes as a resistance to those codes.  Ineffability, then, is deeply tied to a historical phenomenon:  the rise of a text-based culture in nineteenth-century European cities.  It is through this material transformation that ineffability became a viable ideology, and remains compelling to so many today.

Entre os anos 1925 e 1933, Siegfried Kracauer publicou uma série de artigos a respeito da cidade no jornal alemão Frankfurter Zeitung. Os mesmos foram reunidos no livro Ruas em Berlim e em outros lugares, editado em 1963. O trabalho desenvolvido por este filósofo e sociólogo alemão foram definidos por Gerard Raulet como uma etnologia da grande metrópole e, por Philippe Despoix, como a criação de miniaturas urbanas. Ao abordar a Berlim das décadas de 1920-30, Kracauer lança mão de uma escrita que oscila entre a descrição física e a criação de rupturas, com o uso de metáforas e ambientes oníricos. O objetivo deste artigo é examinar os recursos literários utilizados por Kracauer, contextualizando-os em relação aos escritos Walter Benjamin e Ernst Bloch, realizados durante o mesmo período.

Buscando os aspectos da crítica da cultura de Siegfried Kracauer que apontam para uma crítica radical da sociedade, o presente texto analisa a caracterização feita por aquele autor da arte industrializada do início do século XX nas obras O ornamento da massa: ensaios de 1963 e De Caligari a Hitler: uma história psicológica do cinema alemão , de 1947. Atenta-se para a maneira como tal caracterização mapeia a determinação das formas dessa arte pelo ideário e contexto político-econômicos da sociedade onde ela emerge, especialmente no que tange às relações entre avanço técnico e projeto de modernização social na sociedade burguesa.

Review:
"Because of its inspiring move to bring together the theoretical projects of phenomenological,
aesthetic, and poststructuralist philosophy with the urgency of sociocultural and
historical reality, Conscientious Viscerality should be widely read. It will be of interest
not only to German and film studies scholars but for all of those who work on identity,
subjectivity, and the body across the humanities and social sciences. In a time when racist
polemics like German politician Thilo Sarrazin’s recent publication “Germany does away
with itself”—where the strength of the German nation is portrayed to be undermined by
immigration—seem to do and sell so well, we need more books like this." 
Quarterly Review of Film and Video

Review:
"What Curtis points out in her study using an impressive and versatile corpus of films and videos is the role of the recipient for filmic autobiography as a genre that tells the story of a life in images. For their truth claim and effect these images are dependent on the viewer who is asked to "take a particularly empathetic and corporeal stance to the particular kind of intersubjective experience filmic autobiography offers" (41). Thus, the study is not only a contribution to research on filmic autobiography in Germany but moreover a book on reception theory that offers a new and promising view on autobiography in general. Writing as well as filming or telling life stories become both the experience of a different subjectivity and a culturally contingent, narratively transported and changeable construct that must first and foremost be produced in an interchange between producer and recipient."
Scope

The conflict of the image, which historically oscillates between realist and formative tendencies, is invested by the power that the lens offers the photographer as a means of scrutinizing the captured physical reality and producing an appearance of material reality as not perceptible to the naked eye. This tension between a monstration device whose function of revelation passes through the lens of the camera-cinematograph and the physical reality will guide the reflection. To this end, I will take charge of the treatment of this specific capacity of the cinematographic camera in Blow Up by Michelangelo Antonioni. My problematic will consist in showing how Blow-up gives shape to the concept of the "cinematographic approach" through the disposition of a "medial photo-cinematographic" constellation, which considers together photography and cinema as "technical recording material device, optical-mechanical vision devices recording on a physical matrix (by chemical revelation)". This link between image and physical matrix deploys in Blowup photographic technical transfers such as "enlarging" and "cropping", producing an enlightening towards the unlimited "endlessness" of the technical capacity of enlarging (to blow up) and cropping (to crop), paradoxically opacifying the "readability" of the cliché. This impossibility to "make-see" or "see-true" comes up against the "truth of the instantaneous", singling out oneself the photo-cinematographic approach via the unstaged. Both of these photographic practices are invested by Antonioni in the manner and style of revealing a usually "voyeuristic" viewpoint in the face of the technical configurations and the photographer's own work in his reading of the image. The tension between "desire to see" and "impossibility to read" is resolved by the intensification of the unstaged as the presence of "that which is not staged" releasing the energy of the raw material of the physical reality captured by the technical expertise of the filmmakermediated by the character of the photographer. This is how I will show that Blow-up is not simply a film, but the shaping of a concept.

Este artículo presenta una reflexión del impacto de lo tecnológico en el imaginario sociocultural, analizando una etapa muy fructífera en esta relación: la modernidad y el desarrollo de la vanguardia. Debido a la actual presencia de fórmulas híbridas entre lo humano y la tecnología, se establece una genealogía de este tema como una constante en la historia del individuo y, específicamente, en la citada época. Su revisión actual se presta a asimilar una continuidad en dicha línea.
Durante el desarrollo tecnológico de los siglos XIX-XX, el nuevo arte definió a la persona como un híbrido entre humano y máquina. La influencia de sus ficciones sobre lo maquinístico ha llegado hasta la actualidad, donde individuo, arte, ciencia y tecnología continúan interrelacionándose. Por ello, se presenta el estudio de las implicaciones de la vanguardia artística europea ante el paradigma iniciado en la modernidad, pudiendo contribuir a investigaciones que aborden esta temática.

Artykuł poświęcony jest powieści Andrzeja Kuśniewicza z 1970 roku zatytułowanej „Król Obojga Sycylii”. Jest ona analizowana jako intertekstualna metapowieść historiograficzna mówiąca o relacji między pojedynczym podmiotem, jego zniekształconą i naznaczoną przez transgeneracyjne przekazy pamięcią oraz zdarzeniami historycznymi, w które jest uwikłany. Szczególną uwagę poświęcono tym aspektom utworu, które zbliżają jego narracyjną strukturę do narracji filmowej, zgodnie z sugestią Paula Coatesa. W interpretacji wykorzystano również koncepcje Siegfrieda Kracauera oraz Nicolasa Abrahama i Marii Török. Od tych autorów pochodzą ponadto kluczowe dla wywodu pojęcia monogramu i kryptonimu.

Published in: Michel Chaouli, Jan Lietz, Jutta Müller-Tamm, Simon Schleusener, Eds.: Poetic Critique: Encounters with Art and Literature. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2021 (pp.175-201).
https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110688719-013/html
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110688719-013

Impressive cinema palaces with exterior façades illuminated appealingly at night were significant for the big city life of the roaring twenties. The film screenings in the prestigious buildings were framed by a diverse supporting programme. Siegfried Kracauer dealt critically with the formative tendency towards theatricality in the new large cinema buildings such as the Gloria-Palast in Berlin in 1926. He also discussed the supporting programme and the aspect of distraction in the context of modern mass and leisure culture in a progressive and extraordinary way.  Over the past decade, luxury cinemas have been enjoying a revival. In order to examine today’s high-end boutique movie theatres, Siegfried Kracauerʼs thoughts on large cinemas in the “roaring twenties” in Berlin provide critical impulses. In the first part of my paper, two important texts by Kracauer are analysed. In contrast to previous research, Kracauer’s arguments are also compared in greater detail with those by contemporary progressive critics not only in Germany but also in other countries, such as Joseph Roth, Kurt Pinthus, Fritz Olimsky, Kenneth Macpherson, Harry Alan Potamkin and Philip Morton Shand, among others. This also reveals the special nature, quality, and depth of Kracauer’s essays. An analysis of modern luxury movie theatres inspired by Kracauer’s train of thought follows in the second part of this paper.

Die Überlegungen meines Beitrags fußen auf der Annahme, dass zwischen den Denkarten, Schreibweisen und Produktionsformen der Realisten Kracauer und Kluge interessante Ähnlichkeiten und Korrespondenzen bestehen, die jedoch bisher kaum beachtet oder erforscht wurden. Diese möchte ich im Folgenden anhand eines Aspekts nachzeichnen. Kracauer und Kluge orientieren sich als Anwälte des Besonderen an einer Darstellungs- und Forschungsform, die das Fragmentarische der Ganzheit, das Partikulare dem Universellen und die Konstellation dem System gegenüber vorzieht. Dieser anti-systematische Grundzug in ihrem Schaffen rückt die Frage ins Zentrum, wie das erkenntnistheoretische und ästhetische Gefüge eines Realismus gestaltet sein muss, der sich mit sozialer Realität zwar auf eine unsystematische, tentative Weise beschäftigt, dabei allerdings keinen Verzicht auf synthetische Interventionen oder, wie es bei Kluge heißt, »massenhaftes Unterscheidungsvermögen« leisten will.

Em Jacques Offenbach e a Paris de seu tempo (1937), Siegfried Kracauer propõe construir a “biografia de uma sociedade”, a Paris do Segundo Império. O autor busca determinar “a função social” de Offenbach e suas operetas, enfatizando a relação entre o artista e seu tempo. O objetivo deste artigo é discutir a forma híbrida do livro que se configura, nas palavras do autor, como “literatura sociológica” e, a partir dela, o caráter ambivalentemente subversivo das offenbachiadas.

Einst Königsdisziplin des Journalismus ist die Reportage dieser Tage in Verruf geraten. Aufgrund ihrer erzählerischen Verfasstheit wird ihr vorgeworfen, dass sie die Verfälschung von Fakten geradezu forciere, dass sie zu literarisch sei. Tatsächlich hat die Reportage vielfach Eingang in die Literatur gefunden, doch ist sie auch hier nicht nur mit offenen Armen empfangen worden. Linke Intellektuelle der Zwischenkriegszeit haben sich vehement gegen ihre Adaption für die Literatur ausgesprochen - weil sie zu berichtend sei. Dieser doppelten Kritik an der Reportage - als zu berichtend und zu literarisch - wird im Beitrag nachgegangen und danach gefragt, ob die Gebrauchsgattung Reportage in Zeiten von Fake-News und Wahrheitskrise überhaupt noch für irgendetwas zu gebrauchen ist.

This article investigates the role of names, naming, and anonymity in the career and reception history of Siegfried Kracauer. A signature motif of his life and writings, the notion of anonymity is ambivalent, signaling both invisibility and success. The article traces this motif from its treatment in Kracauer's novel Ginster to the role the author ascribes to it in his correspondence with Theodor W. Adorno, to the posthumous fate of his works on both sides of the Atlantic. A comparative reception history shows the different valences of Kracauer's name in German and Anglo-American scholarship, particularly in the history of film studies. The article situates the trope of anonymity at the heart of Kracauer's oeuvre, where it helps define a nonsovereign subject in response to modernity.

El artículo indaga la configuración de los procesos alienantes a los que se enfrenta el protagonista de Pequeño hombre, ¿y ahora qué?, de Hans Fallada, a la luz del desarrollo de los sectores medios alemanes en la República de Weimar. Se cuestiona así la interpretación adorniana de la novela y se especula acerca de la contribución de esta a la teoría marxista de las alienaciones capitalistas.

El trabajo intenta explicitar el concepto de crítica en la obra de Siegfried Kracauer durante el período de entreguerras. Pone para ello en entredicho una clave interpretativa generalizada que quiere todavía hoy encontrar en este filósofo a un teórico posmodernista avant la lettre. El artículo rastrea el desarrollo de la relación sujeto-objeto en la obra de Kracauer como malla configuradora de los respectivos conceptos de crítica de este. En primer lugar, se analiza la crítica anticapitalista de los primeros años de la década de 1920 como forma peculiar de la Kulturkritik. En segundo lugar, se caracteriza la crítica ideológica a la que el propio Kracauer somete la Kulturkritik a partir de aproximadamente 1925. Finalmente, se analiza la forma de la crítica a partir de 1925 como activación consciente de categorías que constituyen la estructura objetiva del mundo histórico. Se concluye así que en Kracauer, y de una manera irreconciliable con las lecturas posmodernistas, el criterio de verdad se halla condicionado por el polo objetivo.

This paper discusses the aesthetic and political motivations of the great importance that Walter Benjamin gives to Charlie Chaplin in Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (1935-1936). First, it proceeds to identify the main paragraphs that Benjamin devoted to Chaplin's films in the different versions of his famous essay. Then it examines Chaplin's reception in Weimar Germany both in the field of avant-garde art and that of press criticism, highlighting the philosophical, ethico-political and psychological arguments exchanged in a wide and intensive debate on the human dimension of the Tramp character.

Resumen: El objetivo del presente artículo es el estudio de las interpretaciones del Kitsch en las obras de Ernst Bloch, Siegfried Kracauer y Walter Benjamin durante la República de Weimar y los primeros años del régimen nacionalsocialista. Se analizan también las críticas filosófico-políticas de estos autores a las representaciones burguesas del sentimiento en tanto elementos determinantes de la construcción ideológica burguesa.

O  presente  artigo  é  o  capítulo  introdutório  de  um  estudo  mais  amplo  sobre  a  análise  histórico-sociológica original de Kracauer do fenômeno do nazifascismo e da “propaganda totalitária”.  [O  trabalho,  que  havia  sido  pensado  originalmente  como  tese  de  livre-docência  de  Carlos  Eduardo  Jordão  Machado,  foi  interrompido  pela  doença.  O  autor  então  apresentou  uma  parte  para  publicação.  Durante  o  processo  de  produção  de  Verinotio  ele  estava  em  tratamento,  e  finalmente  sucumbiu  à  doença,  tendo  sido  impossibilitado de fazer a revisão final do texto. Optamos por publicá-lo ainda assim, em respeito  e  homenagem  ao  autor,  com  pequenas  alterações  anotadas  entre  colchetes  quando imprescindível para o entendimento das ideias expostas. Nota dos editores.]
Com  a  ascensão  de  Hitler  ao  poder  e  em  particular  com  o  incêndio  do  parlamento alemão, [no] final de fevereiro de 1933, Kracauer inicia a difícil experiência  do  exílio  e,  mais  complicado  ainda,  suas  tentativas  de  interpretação  do  nazifascismo  que  vão  culminar  no  seu  estudo,  só  publicado  em  2012,  sobre  a  Propaganda  totalitária(1936-38)  para  o  Instituto  de  Pesquisa  Social.  Aqui  discutimos  seus  primeiros  passos:  o  artigo escrito para a revista L’Europe Nouvelle de maio de 1933 e o Exposé“Massa e propaganda”, [de] dezembro de 1936.

ABSTRACT ENGLISH At the intersection of film/cinema theory and political theory, this essay constellates under the name of maintenance-German: Wartung-the creation of purity by cleaning and waiting-German: Warten-as staying, maintaining. Both maintenances take place at the cinema. The cinema is questioned as to its cleanliness/purity, thus twisting a politically charged aesthetic purism, and opposing current (art-field) discourses that bid farewell to cinema as a form/practice that is no more. "Purified" cinema, however, i.e., the multiplex theater where cleaning (just not yet) takes place while the credits of superhero movies roll, assembles maintenance people: those who clean the room and those who stay in it to wait for credit cookies. This sharing/dividing of time is read as instances of maintenance of a proto-democratic experience that is lost, but not washed away yet. +++++
ABSTRACT DEUTSCH Dieser Essay im Schnittbereich von Film-/Kinotheorie und Politiktheorie verbindet unter dem Namen Wartung/Maintenance die Herstellung von Reinheit als Tätigkeit der Instandhaltung und das Warten, Verbleiben. Ort beider Arten von Wartung/Maintenance ist das Kino. Es wird auf seine "Reinheit" hin gedeutet, in Verdrehung eines ästhetischen Purismus mit politischer Aufladung und entgegen dem gängigen (Kunstfeld-)Diskurs, der Kino als nicht mehr existente Form/Praxis verabschiedet. Das gereinigte Kino hingegen, d.h.: ein Multiplex-Saal, in dem während der Abspänne u.a. von Superheld_innenfilmen (noch nicht) geputzt wird, versammelt Wartungspersonal und Leute, die im Kino bleiben, um auf Credit Cookies zu warten. Diese geteilte Zeit wird gelesen als Maintenance/Aufrechterhaltung verlorener, aber nicht bereinigter Momente protodemokratischer Erfahrung.

On the value of recycling old film theory and films for thinking a longue durée conceptualization of the anthropocene. Considers "natural history" as a genre of the anthropocene (in which genre is understood as a mode of historical interpretation and perception), and then reflects on the historiographical implications of Siegfried Kracauer's 1927 essay on photography as exemplary of this approach, developing a natural-historical media theory through ghosts, garbage, and uncanny creatures.