Cinema and Experience. Miriam HANSEN
in Kracauer’s enthusiastic, almost rhapsodic reviews of Karl Grune’s film Die Straße (The Street, 1923). Following the Frankfurt premiere in February 1924, Kracauer reviewed the film not just once but twice (with some overlap), first in the local section and the following day in the feuilleton section of the paper.18 He returned to the film the following year in his programmatic essay “Der Künstler in dieser Zeit” (The Artist in Our Time), in which he calls upon it to illustrate the dilemma of the contemporary artist—how to engage the gap between “truth” and “existence,” the phenomenal world—and to make a case for a particular philosophical and political stance.19 As late as 1929, in a review of one of Grune’s subsequent works, Kracauer still refers to Die Straße as “one of the best and most forward-pointing films.”20 Like many titles he reviewed during the Weimar period, the film resurfaces in his writings in exile, in particular the Caligari book, though without reference to the earlier accounts and with a decidedly different valence.21
In the 1924 reviews, Kracauer hails Die Straße as nothing less than a manifesto of metaphysical malaise, of the “suffering of the languishing soul in the lifeless bustle” of modern existence. In an exemplary way, the film captures the experience of modern life—“a life deprived of substance, empty as a tin can, a life which instead of an internal relationality [statt des innerlichen Zusammenhangs] knows nothing but isolated events that form ever new series of images in the manner of a kaleidoscope” (W 6.1:56).22 With its emphasis on fragmentation and discontinuity, the film visualizes the spatialized experience of time typical of modernity: “the moment, which is only a point in time, becomes visibility.” Accordingly, the individual’s experience of space dissociates into random encounters with the fragmented material world, epitomized by the modern city street:
What intrudes upon the lonesome wanderer in the voracious streets of the night is expressed by the film in a vertiginous sequence of futurist images, and the film is free to express it this way because the pining inner life releases nothing but fragmentary ideas. The events get entangled and disentangled again, and just as the human beings are living dead, inanimate things participate in the play as a matter of course. A lime wall announces a murder, an electric sign flickers like a blinking eye: everything a confused side-by-side [Nebeneinander], a chaos [Tohuwabohu] of reified souls and seemingly waking things. (W 6.1:57)
The passage displays a number of topoi that recur throughout Kracauer’s Weimar writings: the chiastic relation between the living and the mechanical, animate and inanimate, people and things; the emphasis on externality, on the breakup and flattening out of vertical hierarchies of meaning into paratactic (dis)order (for which he ironically, though not coincidentally, uses the vernacular Hebrew word from Genesis tohuvabohu); and the metaphoric elevation of the city street as the key site of cinematic modernity (pointing toward its canonic inscription in Theory of Film but also resonating with the resurgence of the figure of the flâneur in Weimar culture).23
Most important, Kracauer attributes the film’s contemporaneity to its use of specifically cinematic codes, in particular editing. In the Feuilleton version of the review, he introduces Die Straße as “one of the few works of modern film production in which an object takes shape in a way that only film can give shape, a work which realizes possibilities that only film can realize. . . . Film patches together shot after shot and from these successively unfurling images mechanically recomposes the world—a mute world in which no word passes between human beings, in which the incomplete speech of optical impressions is the only language. The more the represented object can be rendered in the succession of mere images, the ensemble of simultaneous impressions, the more it corresponds to the filmic technique of association” (W 6.1:56). In other words, the affinity between the medium and its presumed object is grounded not in film’s photographic capability, the iconic representation of a presumably given reality, but rather in its syntactic procedures—in the structural affinity of cinematic montage with the logic of fragmentation and random juxtaposition that for Kracauer defines the current stage of the historical process.
Kracauer conceives of film as a material expression—not just representation— of a particular historical experience, an objective correlative, as it were, of the ongoing process of distintegration. The solitude of the individual in a fragmented, empty world that the critic finds evoked in Grune’s film rings with the pathos of personal experience; and the film in turn lends this pathos an allegorical significance and collective resonance. What is remarkable here is the extent to which the critic identifies with the film’s nameless protagonist and his nomadic desire. The figure of the “lonesome wanderer” is referred to as “Sehnsüchtiger,” someone driven by longing, and the narrative situation that propels his odyssey through the “peripheral world” is marked as one of a double exile. Kracauer describes the protagonist (Eugen Klöpfer) as lying on a sofa “in a petty-bourgeois living-room which is supposed to be home [Heimat] yet fails to be just that.” Fascinated with the play of light and shadow on the ceiling, the dreamer gets up to look out of the window. While his wife sees the street only as street, to him the look “unveils the senselessly tempting jumble of reeling life which, alas, is no more a home [Heimat] than the living-room but, instead, adventure and untasted possibility” (W 6.1:54).
In such ekphrastic accounts, the writer acknowledges his own fascination with the same alienated surface life that the lapsarian critic of modernity deplores. Likewise, he identifies with the protagonist’s rejection of bourgeois domesticity, which the film’s misogynist economy associates with the unseeing wife (just as it will later associate female sexuality with prostitution and death). This configuration of a double homelessness—between the sham of the bourgeois interior and the anonymous otherness of the modern street—was to become emblematic of Kracauer’s intellectual persona throughout the Weimar period.24 Just as emblematic, however, is the curious ambivalence by which his writing betrays an affinity with, an awareness of being part of, the allegedly fallen world whose transformation he sought to advance.
When Kracauer returns to Die Straße in his “psychological history of the German film,” written in actual 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