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The Death's-Head Beneath : Film's Image of History

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The Death's-Head Beneath : Film's Image of History The Death's-Head Beneath Film's Image of History Daniel Edwards A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts (Research) School of Theatre, Film and Dance University of New South Wales December 2004 CERTIFICATE OF ORIGINALITY I hereby declare that this submission is my own work and to the best of my knowledge it contains no materials previously published or written by another peISOn, nor material which to a substantial extent has been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma at UNSW or any other educational institution, except where due acknowledgement is made in the thesis. Any contribution made to the research by others, with whom I have worked at UNSW or elsewhere, is explicitly acknowledged in the thesis. I also declare that the intellectual content of this thesis is the product of my own work, except to the extent that assistance from others in the project's design and conception or in style, presentation and linguistic expression is a'Clcnowledged. Abstract Siegfried Kracauer's Theory of Film evokes the possibility that film can offer a unique experience of history, arising from its basis in photographic technology. This thesis reads Theory of Film through earlier drafts of the published book and Kracauer's "Photography'' essay of 1927, thereby exploring the key ideas that run throughout Kracauer's writings on film and photography. Central to his ongoing interest in these mediums is their ability to confront the viewing subject with an estranged image of material reality that is always past by the time we witness it in the image. In the Weimar era, Kracauer's interest in photography's ability to engender an experience of temporal disjunction forms part of a broader interest in modernity's dismantling of pre-modem belief systems and the reconfiguring of conceptions of time and mortality. In the post-war era, he comes to regard film and photography's potential to confront us with an experience of temporal disjunction as vital in maintaining a critical relationship with the past. This thesis extrapolates Kracauer's ideas through a reading of Roberto Rossellini's war trilogy comprising Rome, Open Ciry, Paisa and Germaf!)I, Year Zero. Neo-realism is shown to be an important development in feature film form, in which the viewing subject is no longer encouraged to primarily engage with an emotionally affecting dramatic narrative. Rather, there is an emphasis on the material content of the image itself, and an implicit reflection upon the past nature of the material traces on screen and their relationship to our understanding of history. Germaf!)I, Year Zero in particular is read as an example of a work that memorialises the post­ war moment, partly by mourning the material devastation of the Second World War, but also by formally and thematically depicting the loss of faith in history as a process of progressive, dialectical change. In this way, Neo-realism intersects with many of the key experiences and assumptions that inform Kracauer's ideas in Theory of Film. Acknowledgments First and foremost I would like to thank my supervisor, Doctor George Kouvaros of the School of Theatre, Film and Dance at the University of New South Wales. His interest in my work and dedication to this project has been unwavering across the many years it has taken to complete. George's detailed feedback on countless drafts and ready willingness to discuss my work has been absolutely crucial in the development of my ideas and their expression on the pages of this thesis. Thanks also to my dear friends and fellow post-graduates Hamish Ford and Effie Rassos for their selfless willingness to read my work, provide feedback and engage in many hours of productive discussion. Getting to know them has made the post-graduate experience a truly enriching one. I owe a debt of gratitude to the unfailingly helpful and polite staff of the Margaret Herrick Library in Los Angeles and the ever-affable Charles Silver at the Celeste Bartos Film Study Centre at the Museum of Modem Art in New York. They all greatly assisted my research during a trip to the United States in 2001. A huge thanks to my mother, Jennifer Parry, and her husband, Peter Parry, for their emotional and occasional financial support during my years of post-graduate study. Finally, thanks to Vanessa Rodd for her love and encouragement in the early stages of this thesis, and Michelle Loh for her invaluable support, patience and understanding while it was brought to completion. Contents Introduction 1 Chapter One: The Death's-Head Beneath 12 Part One: Photography as Flat Death Part Two: Kracauer's "Photography" Essay and the Revelation of the Negative Part Three: The Suppression of Temporal Disjunction in Theory oJFilm Part Four: The Marseille Notebooks and The Death's-Head Beneath Chapter Two: Neo-realism's Image of Histoty 47 Part One: Nee-realism as a Break with Previous Film Form Part Two: Rome, Open Ciry and the Newsreel Effect. Part Three: Paisa and the Interplay of Images Part Four: Germa,ry, Year Zero and the Ruins of History Conclusion 92 Filmography 95 Bibliography 96 Introduction This thesis examines the viewing subject's psychological relationship to the photographic image and the implications of this relationship for our experience of the filmic image. Through a reading of Roberto Rossellini's early Neo-realist films, I will argue that film has the potential to undermine positivist understandings of history as a causational chain of events, and instead provoke an understanding of history based on reflection, mourning and loss. The work of German theorist Siegfried Kracauer will play a central role in this argument, particularly his 1927 essay "Photography" and his 1960 book Theory ofFilm. 1 The past fifteen years have seen a significant re-evaluation of Kracauer's work, with one strain of this revival played out in a series of articles in Critical Inquiry and New German Critique in the early 1990s, and more recently in several books.2 This thesis will draw on the reading of Kracauer's ideas found in the work of Miriam Hansen and Gertrud Koch, applying and extending their understanding of Kracauer's ideas by interpreting Theory ofFilm as a response to certain developments in feature film production during the post-war era. Specifically, Chapter Two of this thesis will focus on three films directed by Rossellini: Rome, Open City (Roma, Citta Aperta, 1945), Paisa (Paisan, 1946) and Germmry, Year Zero (Germania, Anno Zero, 1947). The developments in Rossellini's style will be examined in order to trace how they resonate with certain ideas that underpin Kracauer's philosophical investment in the filmic medium in Theory of Film. A key move in recent Kracauer scholarship has been to read Theory of Film through his earlier "Photography" essay. In Chapter One I will show how aspects of "Photography" intersect with Roland Barthes' writings on the medium in Camera 1 "Photography" in Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar EssC!JS, translated and edited by Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), pp. 47-63; Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film-. The Redemption of Pf?ysical Reality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). 2 The writers of Critical Inquiry and New German Critique read Kracauer's work of the 1920s in the context of Marxist-influenced materialist philosophers of the Weimar Republic such as Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, and his post-war books in relation to the work of thinkers like Adorno with the Frankfurt School. For a reading ofKracauer that stresses his differences with these thinkers, see Dagmar Barnouw, Critical Realism: History, Photograpf?y, and the Work of Sie!!fried Kracauer (Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1994). 1 Introduction / 2 Lucida. 3 Barthes' writings provide a useful starting point from which to begin an examination of Kracauer's ideas. Both writers conceive of photography as a medium whose positivist attributes are antithetical to the working of human memory, but they also write of an overwhelming experience of 'pastness' when viewing historical photographs. This experience is such that the image itself appears "a representation of time."4 The theoretical basis of this thesis will revolve around this contradictory response to the photographic image and the implications of Kracauer's claim in Theory of Film that the particular "representation of time" offered by photography might also be incorporated into our experience of film. Taking up certain suggestions and allusions Kracauer makes in Theory ofFilm, I will show how the films of the Italian Neo-realists, and Rossellini in particular, provide an example of how the potential Kracauer sees in the filmic medium might actually play out in a feature film format. Throughout this thesis, I shall refer to Neo-realism as a movement, although some commentators have questioned the validity of this description, since the Neo-realist films represent a range of approaches and subject matter made by filmmakers from a variety of political and religious backgrounds. Furthermore, the term Neo-realism does not seem to have come into use until early 1948, towards the end of the period in which the films usually characterised as Neo-realist were produced.5 While the Neo-realist directors never proclaimed themselves a movement the way the directors of the French Nouvelle vague did for a brief period in the late 1950s and early 60s, a strong case can be made that a small group of Rome-based filmmakers produced a body of work roughly between 1944 and 1948 which was a direct thematic and formal response to Italy's experience of Fascism and war, and that these films contain clear commonalities of both content and style, even as they are inflected with the particular quirks and prejudices of the individual writers and directors who created them.
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