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This chapter is about Siegfried Kracauer's book Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, which was published in 1960. It is important to stress this from the outset because, during the course of his career, Kracauer made a number of contributions to the topic of film theory, not all of which are strictly compatible with the theses of Theory of Film. Exploring the relations and the tensions between Kracauer's earlier writings and Theory of Film is a worthy task for intellectual historians, but, in contrast, the author's purpose is to examine the argument of Theory of Film. That book alone provides more than enough material to engage a brief introductory essay such as this one.

This chapter offers a careful exposition of themes and debates in Weimar Kulturkritik, or cultural criticism, focusing on its two greatest exemplars, Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer. At first tentatively, and then beginning in 1926 with a new focus and resolve, Benjamin and Kracauer set out to reinvent German cultural criticism as a form. Their writings do not simply mirror the new set of preoccupations and circumstances that characterize cultural criticism in the Weimar Republic: no other writers were so instrumental in setting its agenda and defining its formal means and strategies. Kracauer and Benjamin virtually invented the criticism of popular culture. In books and essays such as One Way Street and “Surrealism” (Benjamin) and “The Mass Ornament” and “Photography” (Kracauer), the two writers reinvent cultural analysis as a specific form of the critique of the new urban metropolis. And in doing so, they formulate what is arguably the most compelling theory of modernity ever to arise from cultural criticism.

This chapter provides a careful reconstruction of major themes and points of critical tension amongst Béla Balázs, Siegfried Kracauer, and Rudolf Arnheim, the three greatest theorists of film during the Weimar period. Their contributions are more accurately located in the space between criticism and theory, and can only be understood through the entire historical constellation: the various institutional contexts, aesthetic categories, social practices, and cultural traditions that constituted film as a discursive object; the competing functions of film as mass-produced commodity, art form, and propaganda tool that informed critical practices; and the changing positions of film in relation to other art forms, mass media, and modes of perception and experience.

`Siegfried Kracauer’s film and photographic theory along with cinematic records of early Antarctic exploration explain how this utterly inhospitable continent (Antarctica) and this media theory advance an alternative and denaturalized history of the present. Cinema has the capacity to reveal an earth outside of human feeling and utility without sacrificing the particularity that gets lost in scientific abstraction. And Antarctica, for so long outside of human history altogether, simply numbs feeling and refuses to yield to human purpose. It is also a continent on which celluloid encounters its signifying limits. Kracauer, this chapter argues, helps us to imagine an estranged and selfless relationship to an inhospitable or even posthospitable earth that may not accommodate us.

The Anthropocene is the epoch during which humanity began to replace the earth as something given for a disaster humanity created, an artificial planet and an anthropogenic climate. Cinema is a technology roughly as old as the Anthropocene (by some accounts), and its history demonstrates an attraction to artificial worlds and weather and to a larger culture of environmental design. Siegfried Kracauer’s meditation on the film studio has affinities to Hannah Arendt’s analysis of Sputnik. Both are meditations on artificial worlds and the human desire to produce its own environment and to become self-conditioned. Having turned the earth into a laboratory of the Anthropocene, humanity is faced with a less welcoming planet and thus in need of new political theories of hospitality and strategies of accommodation. Kant’s “Perpetual Peace” and theory of hospitality need to be revised in light of the Anthropocene, and cinema can help us with this task.

The film and video works of Harun Farocki exemplify a critical media practice that pose the questions: What is an Image?, or better, What is a human image? Much of Farocki’s mature work examines in fascinating ways the proliferation of nonhuman perspectives and spaces in the contemporary image environment, and in each case, Farocki asks viewers to reconsider how images provoke both an intelligence and ethics of seeing. Examples are drawn from three of Farocki’s best known works, Inextinguishable Fire, Images of the World and the Inscription of War, and the four-part video installation, Serious Games. The account then turns to the late writing of T. W. Adorno to argue that a deep engagement with the variety of Farocki’s work retroactively gives force and clarity to the style of emancipated cinema that Adorno was trying to imagine in essays like “Transparencies on Film.” The claim here is that Farocki’s work was an ongoing and open-ended experimentation of what a critical writing in images could look like under different media conditions, both historically and formally, especially in relation to his strategies of dissociative and recombinatory montage.

This chapter traces the history of Arnold Fanck’s S.O.S Eisberg (1933), a Hollywood-Germany co-production released in separate versions in English and German by Universal Studios. Starring Leni Riefenstahl, the film tells the story of a scientific expedition lost in Greenlandic ice fjords. Körber considers the film in relation to the rugged, purity-of-nature Bergfilm (‘Mountain film’) genre and examines its proto-Nazi leanings, drawing on Siegfried Kracauer’s From Caligari to Hitler (1947) and Susan Sontag’s ‘Fascinating Fascism’ (1975). She also analyses Fanck’s perhaps spurious claims about the authenticity of his representation of the Arctic, which were used as promotional material for the film, and signals their connection to the close collaboration with Knud Rasmussen, who was filming The Wedding of Palo (1934) in Western Greenland at the same time.

This chapter situates Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of film in its historical context through analysing its key insights—the reciprocal and embodied nature of film spectatorship—in the light of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century philosophy and psychology, charting Merleau-Ponty’s indebtedness to thinkers as diverse as Henri Bergson, Max Wertheimer, Hugo Münsterberg, Rudolf Arnheim, Victor Freeburg, Sergei Eisenstein, and Siegfried Kracauer. The historical Bergson is differentiated from the Deleuzian Bergson we ordinarily encounter in film studies, and Merleau-Ponty’s fondness for gestalt models of perception is outlined with reference to the competing ‘persistence of vision’ theory of film viewing. The chapter ends with a consideration of some of the ways in which James Joyce could have encountered early phenomenology, through the work of the aforementioned philosophers and psychologists and the ideas of Gabriel Marcel, Franz Brentano, William James, and Edmund Husserl.

The introduction examines how theorists at the turn of the twentieth century conceptualised fashion and began to associate it with such concepts as ‘novelty’, ‘standardization’ and ‘capitalism’. It introduces subsequent chapters and situates the argument of the book in the context of existing scholarship on modernism and fashion.

Cinema is a record of the Anthropocene, and not just because it has recorded the changing planet. Celluloid is already embedded in the geological record. Bill Morrison’s film Dawson City: Frozen Time tells the story of how nitrate films were buried in the Yukon permafrost and unearthed decades later. Considered hazardous material, the nitrate film reels are also our cultural heritage. We can read the film as a lamentation that humanity and its culture are impermanent and its archives in jeopardy. But when we consider that so many films have been dumped, burned, and buried, we may be struck with the melancholic possibility that humanity and its culture will never disappear from the earth. In time, the human artifacts on the planet and the traces of humanity’s artificial life worlds will be the nature upon which future life forms create their worlds and rituals of hospitality.