Abstract
The present chapter further develops the analysis of Siegfried Kracauer’s engagement with phenomenology by focusing on a strain of analogies, which connect his interest for the phenomenological project of “material ontologies” as developed by Husserl and Scheler with his theory of film and his understanding of history. In Kracauer’s view, phenomenology, history, and film are similar in that they all require a “bottom up” approach, which engages concrete empirical experience while investing eidetic claims only with a regulatory function. At the same time, however, the three are also interconnected in ways, which complicate their initial plain descriptions. Thus, the historic perspective is seen as complementary to an amended form of phenomenological analysis, while the advent of film and photographic reproduction brings further intricacies to our historic consciousness. In the present chapter, I am primarily interested in following through one particular set of such complications, which leads all the way from the plain analogy between the filmic medium and history, through the aporias of historic film, and ultimately to the historicity of the filmic medium itself, as illustrated by the striking case of contemporary documentary colorizations.
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Notes
- 1.
Kracauer 1960, p. IX.
- 2.
Kracauer and Panofsky 1996, p. 55
- 3.
Werke 3, p. 534.
- 4.
GS 20/1, p. 133.
- 5.
Adorno 2013, p. 36.
- 6.
Adorno 1981/82, p. 202.
- 7.
See for instance Adorno 2013, p. 90.
- 8.
Adorno 1989/90, p. 66.
- 9.
Adorno 1992, p. 63.
- 10.
“Held against the Don Quijotte of panlogism, Husserl is Sancho Panza.” Theodor W. Adorno Archiv, Frankfurt a. Main, Ts 2959 ff. The point of this is quite obvious as Adorno basically sees Husserl serving the cause of idealism (that is: hel** Don Quijotte) with the tools of empirical science (that is: the realism of Sancho Panza).
- 11.
For a more detailed account of these points, see chapter “Eidetic Intuition and Physiognomic Interpretation” in the present book.
- 12.
Kracauer 1994, p. 217.
- 13.
Kracauer 1994, p. 192.
- 14.
Kracauer 1960, p. 201 f.
- 15.
For this particular understanding of intentionality, see above in this chapter, pp. 172 f.
- 16.
Kracauer 1960, p. 201 f.
- 17.
On the contrary, a more recent film like Boyhood (2014), which aimed to cinematographically capture the flux of history itself in shooting its actors for over a decade, was obviously impoverished by its decision to level out all such medial differences between the different episodes of its diegesis.
- 18.
GS I, p. 1237.
- 19.
The same contrast between empathy and actualization is also touched upon in one of Benjamin’s literary essays. Here, he opposes sheer narration, as a procedure trying to asume the position of the immediate witness in relation to a past event, to actualization, seen as a narrative technique, which conjures up the representation of that past in the context of the present. See GS II, p. 331.
- 20.
GS V, p. 273; En., p. 846.
- 21.
One finds a good illustration of both aspects in a film like the Coen brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis (2013), which is on the one hand a faithful reconstruction of the Greenwich Village folk scene of the 1960s, while on the other hand several of its original songs became present day chart hits.
- 22.
Kracauer 1994, p. 209.
- 23.
Kracauer 1960, p. 78.
- 24.
Kracauer 1960, p. 78.
- 25.
Kracauer 1960, p. 78.
- 26.
For a good summary of this dispute see Edgerton 2000.
- 27.
This narrative was of course already undermined with video as early as the 1970s, but since the latter never seriously challenged the primacy of photographic film stock for the use of mainstream cinema, the point only truly became pressing with the digital revolution.
- 28.
See for instance Luther 1931.
- 29.
Quentin Tarantino, for instance, introduced short sequences of black and white film in several of his recent pictures like Death Proof (2007) or Kill Bill (2003/4) as a disruptive element, meant to break the diegetic continuity and stylistically flash out the medium itself; on the contrary, in the first season of Heimat (1984), Edgar Reitz used short color sequences to produce Brechtian moments of disruptions, breaking the viewer’s immersion into the illusionary black and white, quasi-documentary reconstruction of early twentieth century Germany.
- 30.
See for instance Jackson 2019.
- 31.
Jackson 2019.
- 32.
See for instance Bazin 2005, p. 15.
- 33.
Benjamin 1968, p. 220 f.
- 34.
Benjamin 1968, p. 222.
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Luther, Fr. 1931. Ästhetische Werte des Films. In Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 15/1, pp. 263–266.
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Ferencz-Flatz, C. (2023). Sancho Panza and the Dialectics of Historic Film. In: Critical Theory and Phenomenology . Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 125. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27615-6_10
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