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Film As Language: the Politics of Early Film Theory (1920-1960) the Case of Siegfried Kracauer As Émigré Intellectual

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Film As Language: the Politics of Early Film Theory (1920-1960) the Case of Siegfried Kracauer As Émigré Intellectual 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 Weimar Republic, 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.
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