Cinema and Experience. Miriam HANSEN
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
The most remarkable articulation of Kracauer’s anticlassical stance can be found in his essay “Calico-World,” in which he describes a tour through the backlots of the UFA studio in Neubabelsberg.38 Marveling at the vast array of fragmentary sets and props that defy natural interconnections and proportions (including sets for well-known films like Fritz Lang’s Nibelungen and Metropolis and F. W. Murnau’s Faust), he highlights the fact that, to produce the effect of a coherent diegetic world in a film, the world is first cut to pieces. “This dismantling of the world’s contents is radical; and even if it is undertaken for the sake of illusion, the illusion is by no means insignificant” (MO 281–82). With obvious irony yet also wide-eyed delight, he evokes the mortification and disorganization of the seemingly natural world—the surreal assembly of the “ruins of the universe . . . representative samples of all periods, peoples, and styles,” inventoried and stored in warehouses (MO 282)—in terms that resonate with his essay “Photography” of the following year. Similarly, if less explicitly, “Calico-World” links the paradoxical relation between fragmentation and diegetic unity to the historical dialectics of nature, arrested in the appearance of the social order as natural. Classical cinema perpetuates this appearance through its adaptation of bourgeois aesthetic principles, such as theatrical illusionism based on the invisible boundary between viewer and the fictional space of the proscenium stage. The director has the task to organize “the visual material—which is as beautifully disorganized as life itself—into the unity that life owes to art” (MO 288; W 6.1:197). By means of continuity editing and intertitles he turns the “huge chaos” into a “little whole: a social drama, a historical event, a woman’s fate.” Tongue-in-cheek, Kracauer acknowledges that most of the time the desired effect is achieved: “One believes in the fourth wall. Everything guaranteed nature” (MO 288).
Kracauer’s interest in forms of cinematic expression that exceed narrative motivation and integration is coupled with a more porous conception of spectatorship. In a review of a film by E. A. Dupont, for instance, Kracauer singles out ephemeral interludes—“little entrefilets”—not only for the digressive glimpses they afford but also for the way their arrangement appeals to the viewer: “The sequencing of shots is exemplary: the alternation of close-ups, optical fragments, transitions, and master shots leads the imagination [Phantasie] up kaleidoscopic