Siegfried Kracauer (1889–1966)

1
In my opinion, cinema and tragedy are incompatible. This formulation is directly derived from my basic thesis, but it is completely absurd in the mind of a researcher of formal aesthetics. If cinema is to be a photographic device, it must center on the vast outer world—a boundless world that has little in common with the finite, orderly world prescribed by tragedy. In the world of tragedy, fate precludes chance, and the interplay of human beings constitutes the whole center of attention, but the world of cinema is a series of accidental events, involving both human beings and inanimate objects. This kind of image flow cannot cause sadness, which is completely a spiritual experience that has no counterpart in the reality in front of the camera. …
2
Thus, the makers of experimental films, whether they prefer abstractions that make up rhythm or surreal representations of inner reality, seem intent on equating it with raw nature— —the source of the peculiar power of the cinematic device-isolating. The requirement of their modeling urges them to pursue the results with the spirit of modern painting or literature—this pursuit of independent creation makes them not care about the camera's ability to explore, and they are not curious about the whole reality. After they liberated the movie from the shackles of the storyline, they placed it under the rule of traditional art. A 1957 leaflet from the Creative Film Foundation in New York read: "Please assist in the development of film as an art form...." However, the artist's freedom was a constraint on film directors. We do not forget, however, that cinema as a whole was greatly benefited by the avant-garde's experiments with cinematic language, rhythmic editing, and the emergence of almost unconscious processes. Nor should we forget that many avant-garde artists, like Buñuel, have since turned to realism to represent the outside world; Julius Ivens and Cavalcanti have turned to social documentary cinema. ①
①Brunius: "French Experimental Cinema", pp. 102-05; Knight: "The Most Vivid Art", pp.
pp. 108-109.
3
In the movie-goer, the ego, as the main source of thought and determination, relinquishes its ability to control. This constitutes an obvious difference between them and theater audiences. European observers and critics have repeatedly pointed this out. "In the theater," a sensitive French woman once told Wallon, "I am always me, but in the cinema, I melt with everyone and everything." She took a closer look at the melting process she described: "If the film does that, it's because I've made myself one with the film image, because I'm more or less intoxicated by what's going on on the screen. In what unfolded. I was no longer the master of my own life, I entered the film that was projected in front of me."
②Barjevre said something similar in "Overall Cinema: The Future Form of Cinema" (p. 68): "In the theater, the audience watches the performance. In the cinema, the audience participates in the performance." See also Ricart's " Theater and Film: Audience Psychology", especially pages 19, 20, and 57 of the book. Ricart elaborates on the different psychological effects of stage and screen, summarizing them in two fancy diagrams. This little book is a wonderful mixture of many poignant and eccentric points of view. On the one hand, Ricart fully acknowledges the cinema's unique impact on the senses; on the other hand, he rejects it because it supposedly does not "add wealth" to the mind (p. 57). This judgment is obviously consistent with his extremely loyal attitude towards drama and traditional culture.
4
However, we should also say a few good words for this incredible song and dance drama. Even if it's blighted by pompous handling and stylistically irritating dislocations, it's still a show that transcends the confines of the stage, and there's something alluring about it—especially when Maura Hill is in The moment when the red space floats by. This is without a doubt a movie. But it's a film that defeats its purpose because it succumbs to the value and meaning of opera. The entire musical is aimed at enhancing the magic of Offenbach's opera. Powell and Pressburger set aside film as a means of capturing real life, and then brought it back to unfold a picture that was essentially theatrical, though unperformable in theatre. . They discarded all that fresh Lumiere and regressed to the level of the Méliès staged myth. Their hypothetical goal was to create an overarching work of art with opera at its core—a film that would echo Whiffel's fainting dreams of cinema entering the realm of art.
However, the movie takes its vengeance on those who abandoned it. Just like Disney's animations in Fantasia, these floating pictures deprive the music of their nourishment. The opera atrophies, and what remains is a parasitic spectacle that dazzles the eye so that you can't think about it. It is the product of a miraculous studio effect that turns out to exclude all the miracles that a camera can do. Just the trembling of a leaf is enough to expose its false fascination.
5
If film is a product of photography, there must also be a tendency toward realism and modeling. Is it accidental that these two tendencies co-existed immediately after the invention of film? Both tend to go to extremes, trying their best to point out all the ways of film expression at once. Their ancestors were Lumiere (a strict realist) and Méliès (a person who gave free rein to his artistic imagination). The films they shot can be said to embody Hegelian thesis and antithesis. ②
② In his article "The Dialectic of the Film Concept" (published in the July-August 1947 and October 1948 issues of "International Review of Cinema Audience Psychology"), Hegel's dialectic The principle is applied to the evolution of movies. He said that the first dialectical stage is the reproduction of reality by Lumiere, and its antithesis is the complete illusion represented by Méliès (see pages 74-78 of the July-August 1947 issue for details) . Similarly, Morin, in "The Film or Photographer" (p. 58), also considers Méliès's "absolute unreality" to be the Hegelian version of Lumiere's "absolute realism". Antithesis. See also Sadour's "History of Film Art", p. 31.
6
Thus, we might conclude that the film distracts the viewer's attention from central parts of life. That's why Valéry is against cinema. He believes that cinema is a "machine-like precise memory of external things". He blames it for tempting us to imitate the actions of phantom characters on the screen: imitating how they smile or kill or ruminate invisibly. "What is the meaning of all these intertwined, boring but diverse actions and emotions that I see? I am no longer interested in life, because life is nothing more than copying the same. I have already foretold."① According to Valéry, since cinema depicts the external manifestations of the inner life, the cinema almost forces us to imitate the external manifestations and leave the inner life aside. Only appearance and imitation are left in life, so it loses its unique value. The inevitable result is dullness. ②In other words, Valéry insists that cinema, by its exclusive attention to the external world, ends up diverting our attention from what is within the sphere of the mind; The life of the mind is suffocated by our fascination with the images of external life on the screen. Incidentally, he is not the only writer who has entered into such debates. Georges Duhamel also complained that movies made him no longer able to think independently, but instead "replaced his own thoughts with things in movies"③. Nicola Charomont recently accused photography and film of making us "see the world completely from the outside". Or, as he puts it, "the camera's eye gives us that fantastic thing: a world uninfected by consciousness" ④.
① Valéry: "Film Art", see "The Wisdom of Film" edited by Rabier, p. 35.
②Although Valery puts forward this conclusion, he still has a keen sense of the flow of material life, such as his
This is illustrated by the lovely depictions of the streets and canals of Amsterdam. He also realized that in order to fully grasp the visible form, its meaning (which usually serves to recognize the form) must be completely abandoned; See Valery's "Return from Holland", contained in "Variety Show II", pp. 25-27.
③Benjamin: "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction", original citation, see "Journal of Social Research", Vol. 5, No. 1, 1936
Issue, p. 62, see Duhamel's "Scenes of Future Life" (Paris, 1930) for the original text.
④ Charomont: "Talking about Movies", contained in "Endorsement", No. 4, 1948.… (mais)