Cinema and Experience WEIMAR AND NOW: GERMAN CULTURAL CRITICISM Edward Dimendberg, Martin Jay, and Anton Kaes, General Editors Cinema and Experience Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Th eodor W. Adorno Miriam Bratu Hansen UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley Los Angeles London University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2012 by Th e Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hansen, Marian Bratu, 1949–2011. Cinema and experience : Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Th eodor W. Adorno / Miriam Bratu Hansen. p. cm.—(Weimar and now: German cultural criticism ; 44) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-520-26559-2 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn 978-0-520-26560-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Motion pictures. 2. Kracauer, Siegfried, 1889–1966—Criticism and interpretation. 3. Benjamin, Walter, 1892–1940—Criticism and interpretation. 4. Adorno, Th eodor W., 1903–1969—Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. PN1994.H265 2012 791.4309—dc23 2011017754 Manufactured in the United States of America 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on Rolland Enviro100, a 100 percent postconsumer fi ber paper that is FSC certifi ed, deinked, processed chlorine-free, and manufactured with renewable biogas energy. It is acid-free and EcoLogo certifi ed. For Michael Geyer In memory of Karsten Witte (1944–1995) contents Preface ix Acknowledgments xix Abbreviations xxi part i. kracauer 1. Film, Medium of a Disintegrating World 3 2. Curious Americanism 40 part ii. benjamin 3. Actuality, Antinomies 75 4. Aura: Th e Appropriation of a Concept 104 5. Mistaking the Moon for a Ball 132 6. Micky-Maus 163 7. Play-Form of Second Nature 183 part iii. adorno 8. Th e Question of Film Aesthetics 207 part iv. kracauer in exile 9. Th eory of Film 253 Notes 281 Index 357 preface Th e question of how “to engage a living thought that is no longer historically current,” raised by Fredric Jameson with regard to Th eodor W. Adorno, has a par- ticular urgency when the body of thought revolves around the cinema, especially in today’s rapidly changing media environment.1 If that ongoing future increas- ingly became one of the concerns ticking in the background of this study, it also made me more keenly aware of the specifi c historicity of the writings discussed— less in the sense of their loss of “currency” than in their contemporaneity with key junctures in the history of the cinema and the social and political histories of the twentieth century. Much as they illuminate those junctures, they oft en do so from an untimely angle, which lends them a diff erent kind of actuality in the present. At the same time, I couldn’t fail to realize the extent to which this project was bound up with my own history, a history that entailed switching countries, lan- guages, and fi elds—from Germany to the United States, from German to English, from the study of literary modernism and the avant-garde to the study of fi lm. When I began to read my way into American cinema studies around 1980, the fi eld was dominated by psychoanalytic-semiotic fi lm theory, with its ground- ing in Lacan and Freud, Althusserian Marxism, and feminism, which had taken Anglophone shape in the British journals Screen and Edinburgh Magazine and the then-Berkeley-based Camera Obscura. Th is hegemony soon waned, challenged by the competing and asymmetrical paradigms of, on the one hand, cultural studies and, on the other, neoformalism or historical poetics and cognitivism. Yet the intellectual energy that had made psychoanalytic-semiotic theory a magnet for ix x preface fi lm scholars and a motor in the academic legitimation of cinema studies—at a time when the humanities were under the sway of poststructuralism—seemed to have migrated into the exploration of early cinema, beginning with the legendary Brighton symposium of 1978 and richly fed by the annual Pordenone Giornate del Cinema Muto and other retrospectives. I felt drawn to the study of early cinema, not least because it engaged fi lm history in a theoretically inspired mode that interlaced careful attention to formal and stylistic features with empirical research into conditions of production, distribution, and exhibition as well as broader ques- tions concerning the complex set of transformations commonly referred to as modernity. I had come from a country in which there was eff ectively no tradition of fi lm qualifying as the object of academic inquiry (with a few exceptions during the early decades of the twentieth century). Th ere was nothing comparable to the organizational eff orts in instruction, archiving, and research in the United States and France, which in recent years have themselves become the object of historical research. To be sure, fi lm history and fi lm theory were part of the curricula of the fi lm academies (Ulm, Munich, Berlin) that had been founded thanks to the fi lm politics following the 1962 Oberhausen manifesto, but these topics had no place at the universities. At the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University of Frankfurt am Main, where I was a student from 1967 to 1976, Karsten Witte’s courses on National Socialist fi lm and on “theory of cinema” (1970–71) were an early exception, fol- lowed by the fi rst fi lm courses in American Studies, which was one of my fi elds.2 In addition, Alexander Kluge taught a series of compact seminars on fi lm and media in 1975–76, which I attended (and which initiated an enduring relationship of collaboration between us). It was not that Germany—more precisely, West Germany or the Federal Repub- lic—was lacking a fi lm culture. While commercial theaters had been closing in great numbers and audiences were staying home to watch television, a new wave of alternative repertory theaters, both private and municipally sponsored (Kom- munale Kinos), took off around 1970; the same year, a festival of independent cinema (Frankfurter Filmschau ’70) was held on the campus of Frankfurt Univer- sity. In the aft ermath of the student movement, a new moviegoing public emerged, eager to overcome a history still deeply compromised by Nazi cinema’s usurpa- tion of cinematic aff ect and pleasure. We watched everything: “Young German” and European auteurs, New Hollywood and old, Spaghetti Westerns, the canonic works of international silent and sound cinema, contemporary experimental and underground fi lms. Th is new fi lm culture crucially included intellectually pointed critical writing on fi lm—in the Feuilleton or cultural sections of major papers such as Frankfurter Rundschau, Süddeutsche Zeitung, and occasionally, Frank- furter Allgemeine and Die Zeit—by authors such as Frieda Grafe, Helmut Faerber, preface xi Wolfram Schütte, Karsten Witte, Gertrud Koch, Hartmut Bitomsky, and others. And not least, there was the fl ourishing of independent fi lmmaking that benefi tted from public television stations and from subsidy legislation fought for by Kluge and others, and from which a group of Autoren or auteur directors (Fassbinder, Herzog, Wenders, et al.) was to become New German Cinema once their work was shown at the New York Film Festival and other international venues such as the Goethe Institutes. When I studied at Frankfurt University, Critical Th eory was the leading intel- lectual tradition, one that had early on analyzed the economic, social, and political conditions of fascism and had presciently warned of the rise of National Socialism; it also had assumed a critical role vis-à-vis the social and cultural order of postwar Germany, in particular its inability to “come to terms” with that historical legacy.3 By the 1960s, the term Critical Th eory was used in a broader sense to name both the Frankfurt School (referring to the members of the Institute for Social Research who had returned from exile, notably Max Horkheimer, who had coined the term Critical Th eory; Adorno; and former members such as Herbert Marcuse and Leo Löwenthal who had opted to stay in the United States) and writers associated with various forms and degrees of Marxist thought, such as Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Georg Lukács, and Siegfried Kracauer, as well as a younger generation of writers such as Jürgen Habermas, Oskar Negt, and Kluge.4 If I now, in this book, think of Kracauer, Benjamin, and Adorno not only as Critical Th eorists but also as part of the German-Jewish intellectual tradition, this was not necessarily the case when I fi rst encountered their writings (and, with Adorno, his teaching); and one would probably not have thought of Adorno in that tradition before 1933. Being Jewish was not a topic of conversation at the uni- versity when I was a student, nor anywhere else beyond the small, newly emerging Jewish congregations and organizations devoted to Christian-Jewish cooperation. Jewishness was a relatively abstract, yet highly charged symbolic—philosophical, moral, and political—category, bound up with the history of anti-Semitism and annihilation. It had presence primarily as a repressed past that had to be brought to public consciousness and justice: this had been the twofold intention, at least, of the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials of 1963–65 (which I occasionally attended because my mother was involved in taking care of survivor witnesses).5 But Jewishness referred to neither a living cultural identity nor the legacy of fractured biographies.