Notes on Kracauer

From Caligari to Hitler. The film medium, suited to explore reality. “Of all the technical properties of film the most general and indispensable is editing.” Film comes from instantaneous photography (Muybridge/Marey) and Magic lanterns/motion machines, goal = to picture things moving. “Film is uniquely equipped to record and reveal physical reality… the transitory world we live in.” Special cinematic techniques (soft focus, close-ups, super impositions, dissolves), these are means for implementing the potential of the medium at the service of “camera-reality.” 2 main tendencies: Lumière (strict realist) vs Méliès (free reign of artistic imagination). Méliès substituted “staged illusion for unstaged reality,” he exploits many cinematic devices but uses photography in a pre-photographic spirit. Movement is cinematic, only the motion picture camera can record them. “recording functions” + “revealing functions”. The Chase: motion at its extreme. Dancing, 2nd type of specifically cinematic movement. Films go beyond the stage because they can dwell not only on actors but on nonhuman objects as well. “Films in which the inanimate merely serves as a background to self-contained dialogue and the closed circuit of human relationships are essentially uncinematic.” Films can reveal things normally unseen, objects too small (revealed through close-up) or too big. The Realistic Tendency vs The Formative Tendency. “Due to its fixed meaning, the concept of art does not, and cannot, cover truly “cinematic” films-films, that is which incorporate aspects of physical reality with a view to makes us experience them.” “Even the most creative filmmaker is much less independent of nature in the raw than the painter or poet; that his creativity manifests itself in letting nature in and penetrating it.” The Griffith CUs are not only important components of the narrative but reveal new aspects of physical reality. Accelerated and slow-motion show us things we could’ve never seen in real life (the growth of a plant, an explosion). Blind spots of the mind, the refuse (objects that remain unnoticed because we never look their way, like the aftermath of a party), the familiar (opposite of the refuse, we get so used to seeing them we take it for granted). Phenomena overwhelming consciousness: experiences so overwhelming that we can’t fully comprehend them, like death, elemental catastrophes, atrocities of war, acts of violence and terror, sexual debauchery ,etc. Special modes of reality: “expose physical reality as it appears to individuals in extreme states of mind." Cinema should reveal, not just record.
Examples:
- Waterer Watered by Lumière. “Story from everyday life”. Gorky said: “The spray will hit you…we shrink back.” Nature caught in the act.
- Arrival of a Train (Lumière) vs A Trip to the Moon (Méliès), the train in the Lumière is the real thing while in Méliès it is a toy train
- The Red Shoes, “Moira Shearer dances, in a somnambulistic trance, through fantastic worlds avowedly intended to project her conscious mind-agglomerates of landscape-like forms, near-abstract shapes, and luscious color schemes which have all the traits of stage imagery. Disengaged creativity thus drifts away from the basic concerns of the medium.”
- Keystone Chase films
- Ten Days That Shook the World, Eisenstein shows us a physical universe reflecting exultation (special mode of reality)