Cinema and Experience. Miriam HANSEN
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
More generally, the idea that film may lend special articulation to the world of things is reminiscent of Béla Balázs’s concept of film as modern physiognomy, in particular his notion that cinematic technique is capable of conveying the “expressive” quality of material objects, landscapes, and faces; likewise, there are important resonances with the writings of Jean Epstein.52 Indebted like Balázs to Simmel’s philosophy of art, Kracauer assumes that what animates the cinematic representation of things has as much to do with the emotion of the subject as with the moving object.53 Film’s physiognomic capacity offers a mode of perceptual experience that blurs analytic distinctions between subject and object and allows things to appear in their otherness. But while Balázs, even as a Marxist, adheres to the romantic and idealist undercurrents of Lebensphilosophie, or the philosophy of life, Kracauer, as we shall see, enlists film’s physiognomic ability in a materialist philosophy of death.
TOWARD A MODERNIST MATERIALISM
That Kracauer’s film theory has its motor in a particular relationship to the world of things is one of the many insights in Adorno’s ambivalent homage to his old friend and mentor on the latter’s seventy-fift h birthday.54 As shrewd as it is condescending, Adorno’s portrait of Kracauer concludes with the observation that the “primacy of the optical” in him was not just, as suggested earlier in the essay, a matter of his architectural training or talent: “Presumably, [it] is not something inborn but rather the result of this relationship to the world of objects.” Adorno speculates that Kracauer’s special penchant for visuality has its roots in a “fixation on childhood, as a fixation on play,” that compensates for the suffering inflicted upon the self by human beings with a “fixation on the benignness of things.” This translates, in Adorno’s judgment, into a major theoretical and political deficiency: “One looks in vain in the storehouse of Kracauer’s intellectual motifs for rebellion against reification.” Considering that the concept of reification is a cornerstone of Adorno’s own theory of modernity, we can easily imagine how Kracauer’s engagement with the world of things seemed tantamount to a critical sellout, a nostalgic yearning for a place beyond critique: “The state of innocence would be the condition of needy objects, shabby, despised objects alienated from their purposes.”55
What eludes Adorno is that Kracauer’s allegedly uncritical immersion into the world of things, his lack of protest or indignation vis-à-vis reification, is perhaps responsible for the enormous historiographic and cognitive wealth his writings yield, his careful registering of modernity’s multifaceted and