Film as Language: The Politics of Early Film Theory (1920-1960) The case of Siegfried Kracauer as émigré intellectual

Markus Rheindorf, with Alexandra Ganser and Julia Pühringeri

IFK Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften International Reserach Center for Cultural Studies

Reichsratsstraße 17 1010 Vienna, Austria Tel.: (+43-1) 504 11 26-15 Fax: (+43-1) 504 11 32 [email protected] http://www.ifk.ac.at

Department of Applied Linguistics University of Vienna

Berggasse 11 1090 Vienna, Austria [email protected] www.univie.ac.at/linguistics http://homepage.univie.ac.at/Markus.Rheindorf/ That any given politics is largely constructed through and in language; that language and language use are always political and that therefore there is not only a language of politics but also a politics language; and that the sciences – whether social, natural, etc. – construct a politics inasmuch as they are a social phenomenon largely situated in the domain of language: these are three critical positions to which my argument here responds. Building on these, I would like to propose a new focus for research in the field of language and politics: the correspondence between a given political position (within the sciences) and a specific understanding and use of the notion of “language” as such. In this, I am taking a detour through a historically specific case: the discourse of early film theory, in particular the work of film critic and theorist Siegfried Kracauer (1889 – 1966). The early history of the now institutionalized discipline of film studies, as I shall argue, provides an intriguing example of the way in which the language of science and theory articulates a politics (and is articulated by politics) by way of its changing use of the term “language” – in this case, the “language of film”. Although most accounts of the history of film theory recognize Siegfried Kracauer as one of the key figures in the early formation of the field, he is conventionally portrayed as the most “naïve” of the theorists in the realist “camp” (e.g. Andrew 1976). While there is no doubt a factual basis for such an appraisal of his position, especially with respect to his later writings, such an unproblematic dismissal of his theoretical position nevertheless depends on a reading that thoroughly ignores the many contradictions that mark his writings. Significantly, the same is true of more recent attempts to redeem if not valorize Kracauer’s work. In these, as much as in the former, one finds a wilful reduction of the contradictions that characterize his criticism and theorizing. Rather than writing these aspects out of my account of early film theory, for which Kracauer’s work can be seen as representative, I am interested precisely in these contradictions or ruptures and their conditions of possibility. The still common reading of early film theory as “naïve” and “impressionistic” first emerges in the 1970ies, in the wake of the structuralist turn in film theory initiated by Christian Metz (1974a, 1974b), and is the consequence of several factors located both inside and outside the field of film theory itself. Many of these factors can be traced to the earliest beginnings of film theory, which, emerging in the cultural and political environment of the 1920ies, initially took the form of journalistic criticism. Because it was therefore determined to a considerable degree by constraints (of economic, political, cultural, and discursive kinds) alien to the favoured image of a field that was just being established as an academic

- 1 - discipline, film theorists in the 70ies were eager to distance themselves from what they saw as a first phase of “impressionistic” and “unsystematic” reflection on the medium. In contemporary criticsm, the linguistic turn of the 70ies is seen as a radical caesura in the development of film theory (cf. Elsaesser & Poppe 1994) insofar as it set new standards for the field. It was to be a “film science” that could hold its own against the established disciplines: rigorous, systematic, and ostensibly neutral as to the aesthetic quality and ideological import of film. In so far as this was indeed a break with early film theory, it is not coincidental that the Metzian project began with the explicit attempt to examine the metaphor of “film language” and to determine, once and for all, the truth of the analogy it suggested (Metz 1974a). Metz rightly recognized that the term as such had proliferated in the writings of both film theorists and film critics in the course of the last five decades, as had its disparate and often irreconcilable meanings. Instead of condemning, as Metz did, this apparently unsystematic and certainly un-linguistic use of the term as irresponsible, my approach to the politics of early film theory takes advantage of the simultaneous ubiquity and discontinuity of the notion that film constitutes or possesses a language of its own, making this notion and its concrete articulations in the discursive field of early film theory the focus of analysis. By virtue of the sheer effort and seriousness that Metz and other semioticians in his wake conferred to the issue of film’s likeness to language – which, even as they questioned it radically, they put at the centre of film theoretical discourse more than it had ever been before – the long history of the notion of a “language of film” was redefined as the unsystematic pre- history of the Metzian project, at least in terms of film theory’s disciplinary historiography (e.g. Andrew 1976). This neglect of early efforts to establish a conceptual relationship between film and language is further reinforced by the conventional account of early film theory as a struggle between “formalist” and “realist” theories. As this account is organized by and depends upon the essential opposition between these theory “blocks”, it precludes any consideration of the presence of the notion of “film language” on both sides of the retrospectively fortified borders between formalism and realism. The resulting blind spot in the history of film theory forms the focal point of my research not solely because of its long neglect. In terms of a cultural history of the discursive formation of early film theory, the recognition that, before its structuralist reworking, the (never singular) concept of film language functioned as a culturally and politically overdetermined site of contested meaning is of much greater interest than a rereading of film theory for its own sake. In the discursive field of early film theory, the term “film language” – itself always closely related to specific notions of “language in film” – could be appropriated

- 2 - for the most disparate theoretical trajectories. Hence its tendency to work so well within a number of cultural and political agendas with (un)remarkable ease. Among other things, this means that writing the early uses of “film language” out of the history of film theory is concomitant with its decontextualization and depoliticization – effects which clearly had positive connotations in the context of the painstaking establishment of film theory as an academic discipline. While the above is true of early film theory as a whole, the case of Siegfried Kracauer’s writing is of particular interest in this respect, most importantly because of the enormous changes undergone by both his theory and the world to which it responded – that is, the historically specific cultural contexts with which its was articulated. The fact that, in the course of the four decades in which Kracauer wrote and re-wrote “his” theory of film, there was both dramatic change and subtle continuity can be illustrated by mapping several of the positions that gained prominence in his writing at specific historical junctures. During the earliest phase of Kracauer’s writing in the 20s and early 30s, when his utopian hope for the ability of film to change society was confronted with the increasingly disillusioning political reality of the , he wrote of film as language in the sense of an “Esperanto of the eye” (Kracauer 1931). This universal language, which he saw approximated if not realized in the mature silent films of Chaplin, would have been able to facilitate an understanding between the peoples of Europe and prevented a return to the horrors of the Great War. Towards the end of the 40s, Kracauer, who had barely managed to escape (first to France and then to the United States), but had, like so many other Jewish émigrés, lost his family to the concentration camps, had radically changed his conception of “film language” in the context of a theory that regarded film primarily as a mass medium. At this time, Kracauer was working on his first major book on film, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (1947), which had been indirectly commissioned by the U.S. government as a history of German film. The book was conceived and written as psychological warfare and perhaps its most significant effect was as contribution to a large- scale pathologization of the “German national character” – or the “national unconscious”, as Kracauer called it in this book – that involved many of the intellectuals that had found their way to the United States. Like so many of them, Kracauer became involved in what, in reality, was less an attempt to understand the enemy better, than an effort to prove what had been determined in advance: that there was – that there had to be – something specific about what defined “being German” that could explain the rise of Hitler, even make it appear as an

- 3 - inevitable consequence of that elusive essence of “German-ness”. In this search, however, what mattered were essentials, not variables, in the German experience of the 20s and 30s. In Kracauer’s writing, film was now conceptualized as a language insofar as this allowed him to read the films of the Weimar Republic as the visually expressive language of the collective unconscious of the German people – a language which spelled in large letters the failure of film in preventing, or at least in opposing, the rise of National Socialism. Only in the course of the 50s, when working on his long-planned and ambitious project of a coherent theory of film, did Kracauer come to define the “language of film” as the technical properties of the medium. Both the concept and its redefined reference could thus effectively be written out of his theory, as he defined film’s “technical” properties as secondary to its “basic” properties and possibilities. In the same move, Kracauer identified the technical properties of film with the formalist aspiration of many filmmakers and film’s basic properties with the filmmaker’s realist obligations. The surviving draft versions of the book finally published in 1960 as Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality testify to the fact that Kracauer’s rewriting of his theory so that it excluded film’s “technical” aspect (i.e. editing and montage) paralleled the contemporary debates about the “un-American masses” under the spell of McCarthyism. By 1960, Kracauer had effectively aligned “film language”, re-defined as the technical properties of the medium, with an essential pair of negatives: the formalist tendency as manifested in the high-cultured theatre films he had always abhorred and in the montage principle as practiced by Russian (read that Communist) filmmakers. He read both as symptoms of an ideological contamination and manipulation of the raw material of “physical reality”. As the film camera itself faithfully captures “nature in the raw”, he blamed the very possibility of these formalist “perversions” on the unchecked use of “film language”. As these examples demonstrate, the contradictory appropriations of the term “film language” in early film theory become meaningful in terms of a cultural history only when their „meaning effects“ (Grossberg 1992) are read as articulated with the context of specific historical junctures. In order to not only trace the seemingly random multiplicity of meanings that Kracauer (and other early film theorists) gave to the term “film language”, but also to grasp the cultural and political effects of its always specific deployment within a discursive field, my work seeks to integrate a cultural studies approach with the analytical framework and methods of Critical Discourse Analysis (as outlined in Fairclough & Wodak 1997, Reisigl & Wodak 2001). Since most of the material accessible to me belongs to the written discourse of early film theory, the highly differentiated set of analytical tools provided by discourse

- 4 - analysis will supplement the theoretically elaborate but methodologically open approach of cultural studies. Because of its theoretical and methodological openness, its commitment to contextual analysis, and its interest in the political and cultural dimension of discursively negotiated positions, the research program of CDA proves compatible with the theoretical framework of a cultural studies approach (cf. Rheindorf 2004). From the reverse angle, cultural studies’ “radical contextualism” may prove an adequate solution to CDA’s considerable difficulties with the theoretical and methodological mediation between the levels of text and context (cf. Wodak 2001: 12). There are several reasons why the transdisciplinary project of cultural studies in its Anglo-American tradition presents a suitable and even necessary framework for the aims of my research. For one, it offers the theoretical and methodological means to describe the discursive formation of early film theory – to be precise, the effectivity of specific articulations organized around the notion of “film language” – as effects of their conditions of possibility, i.e. their relevant context. What is more, cultural studies offer the opportunity for adding a specific layer of meaning to the project of rehistoricizing the history of film theory. One of the more remarkable effects of Metzian filmolinguistics in the early 70s was the gradual establishment of film theory’s self-conception as a “scientific” endeavour closely modelled on structuralist linguistics. In fact, one of the first things Metz accomplished, drawing on de Saussure’s distinction between “langue” and “parole”, was the exclusion of the phenomena he subsumed under the label of “le cinéma” – which included the social, cultural, and political dimensions of film – from the field of expertise appropriate to film theory. And even though issues of the ideological and social functions of film eventually found their way back into film theory through the intervention of theoretical trajectories of movements such as feminism and , the exclusive focus on the filmic text advocated by Metz has remained largely uncontested within film theory. What has, in a sense, remained buried to, or cut off from, contemporary film theory are those early approaches to film – including Kracauer’s – which share several important characteristics with the project of cultural studies. The most remarkable of these traits are: an understanding of film as an a priori social phenomenon, the self-reflexive position of the film critic or theorist as a social critic or theorist, and a passionate and often precarious ambivalence toward the popular culture of the masses. Even though these aspects of early film theory often appear theoretically simplistic and out of date to a contemporary reader, their suppression in film theory’s disciplinary historiography has deprived the field of the contextual awareness of a critical project able to

- 5 - recognize its own situatedness in society. The project of cultural studies offers the conditions for such awareness not only in terms of its theoretical elaborations, but also in the concrete practice of its critical engagement with its own history and conditions of possibility (cf. Grossberg 1992: 25). It is, however, not my ambition to re-discover, as it were, early theories of film such as Kracauer’s as precursors of cultural studies. Rather, I intend to read their own, historically specific struggle for the resistant in popular and mass culture in the 20s and 30s as a historical alternative to the formation of cultural studies in the 50s and 60s. Emphasizing the specific in the development of Kracauer’s theory brings me to a further field of research that has some importance for my work. Since the relevant context of his writing is, in part, of a markedly biographical nature, my research resembles the work of many “intellectual biographies” (cf. Toman 1995). However, my final interest lies not with the reconstruction of a biographical whole but with the context in which specific discursive formations were enabled and constrained in their articulation. The position of the biographical in relation to wider, historical contexts of culture and politics is at once individual and social; its specific effectivity – as, for instance, in the work of Kracauer – is precisely the fact that experiences of a very personal and intimate kind – i.e., Kracauer’s losses and his personal disillusionment with film – frequently prove impossible to reconcile with a theoretical discussion of the role of film in society. The fields of discourse analysis, cultural studies, film theory, and „intellectual biography” are four main areas of my work; and while all four suggest a possible frame of reference for its aims, it is the first two – discourse analysis and cultural studies – which form the theoretical foundation for my engagement with the cultural and political aspects of Kracauer’s theory across four decades and two continents. Against both the conventional history of early film theory as naïve and recent efforts to rediscover early theorists as precursors of postmodern theories, I am trying to allow the many contradictions that mark Kracauer’s writings to persist and indeed to retain a disturbing, potentially disruptive quality within the history of film theory as a field of conflicting cultural forces.

References Andrew, J. Dudley (1976): The Major Film Theories. An Introduction. New York, Oxford University Press.

- 6 - Elsaesser, Thomas & E. Poppe (1994): „Film.“ In: Asher, R. E. & J. M. Y. Simpson (eds.): The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics. Vol. 3. Oxford et al: Pergamon Press. 1225- 1241. Fairclough, Norman & Ruth Wodak (1997): „Critical Discourse Analysis.“ In: Van Dijk, Teun A. (ed.) (1997): Discourse as Social Interaction. Discourse Studies: A Multidisciplinary Introduction. Volume 2. London: Sage. 258-284. Grossberg, Lawrence (1992): We Gotta Get Out of This Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture. New York: Routledge. Kracauer, Siegfried (1931): „Lichter der Großstadt.“ In: Witte, Karsten (Hrsg.) (1974): Kino. Essays, Studien, Glossen zu Film. am Main Suhrkamp. ------(1947): From Caligari to Hitler. A Psychological History of the German Film. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ------(1960): Theory of Film. The Redemption of Physical Reality. London: Oxford University Press. Metz, Christian (1974a): Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema. New York: Oxford University Press. Metz, Christian (1974b): Language and Cinema. The Hague: Mouton. Reisigl, Martin & Ruth Wodak (2001): Discourse and Discrimination. Rhetorics of Racism and Antisemitism. London et al: Routledge. Rheindorf, Markus (2004): “Praxen der Reartikulation in den neuen Medien: Texte und Kontexte des Videospielfilms und seiner Rezeption.” .” In: Panagl, Oswald & Ruth Wodak (eds.): Text und Kontext: Theoriemodelle und methodische Verfahren im Vergleich. Wien: Königshausen und Neumann. Toman, Jindřich (1995): The Magic of a Common Language: Jacobson, Mathesius, Trubetzkoy, and the Prague Linguistic Circle. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Wodak, Ruth (2001): „What is CDA about – a summary of its history, important concepts and its developments.“ In R. Wodak & M. Meyer (eds.): Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis. London: Sage. 1-14. i This paper grew out of a larger on-going project at the University of Vienna, which is informed by the same concerns. As a multimedia collaboration between teachers, undergraduate and graduate students, it was inaugurated by the late Prof. Kurt A. Mayer in 1999 and has evolved into a related web anthology (to be found at http://www.univie.ac.at/Anglistik/easyrider/welcome.htm).

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