Siegfried Kracauer's American Writings

Siegfried Kracauer's American Writings PDF Author: Siegfried Kracauer
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520952006
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
Siegfried Kracauer (1889–1966), friend and colleague of Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, was one of the most influential film critics of the mid-twentieth century. In this book, Johannes von Moltke and Kristy Rawson have, for the first time assembled essays in cultural criticism, film, literature, and media theory that Kracauer wrote during the quarter century he spent in America after fleeing Nazi-occupied Europe. In the decades following his arrival in the United States, Kracauer commented on developments in American and European cinema, wrote on film noir and neorealism, examined unsettling political trends in mainstream cinema, and reviewed the contemporary experiments of avant-garde filmmakers. As a cultural critic, he also ranged far beyond cinema, intervening in debates regarding Jewish culture, unraveling national and racial stereotypes, and reflecting on the state of arts and humanities in the 1950s. These essays, together with the editors' introductions and an afterward by Martin Jay offer illuminating insights into the films and culture of the postwar years and provide a unique perspective on this eminent émigré intellectual.

Siegfried Kracauer's American Writings

Siegfried Kracauer's American Writings PDF Author: Siegfried Kracauer
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520952006
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 305

Get Book Here

Book Description
Siegfried Kracauer (1889–1966), friend and colleague of Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, was one of the most influential film critics of the mid-twentieth century. In this book, Johannes von Moltke and Kristy Rawson have, for the first time assembled essays in cultural criticism, film, literature, and media theory that Kracauer wrote during the quarter century he spent in America after fleeing Nazi-occupied Europe. In the decades following his arrival in the United States, Kracauer commented on developments in American and European cinema, wrote on film noir and neorealism, examined unsettling political trends in mainstream cinema, and reviewed the contemporary experiments of avant-garde filmmakers. As a cultural critic, he also ranged far beyond cinema, intervening in debates regarding Jewish culture, unraveling national and racial stereotypes, and reflecting on the state of arts and humanities in the 1950s. These essays, together with the editors' introductions and an afterward by Martin Jay offer illuminating insights into the films and culture of the postwar years and provide a unique perspective on this eminent émigré intellectual.

Siegfried Kracauer's American Writings

Siegfried Kracauer's American Writings PDF Author: Siegfried Kracauer
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520271823
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
“We know Siegfried Kracauer as a brilliant Weimar essayist, a Frankfurt School fellow traveler, and a pioneering postwar film theorist. This collection of his American writings uncovers fascinating corners of his film and cultural criticism, firmly placing him in the context of the New York Intellectuals as well.”—Peter Decherney, author of Hollywood's Copyright Wars: From Edison to the Internet.

Siegfried Kracauer's American Writings

Siegfried Kracauer's American Writings PDF Author: Siegfried Kracauer
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520271831
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
“We know Siegfried Kracauer as a brilliant Weimar essayist, a Frankfurt School fellow traveler, and a pioneering postwar film theorist. This collection of his American writings uncovers fascinating corners of his film and cultural criticism, firmly placing him in the context of the New York Intellectuals as well.”—Peter Decherney, author of Hollywood's Copyright Wars: From Edison to the Internet.

The Mass Ornament

The Mass Ornament PDF Author: Siegfried Kracauer
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674551633
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 420

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Book Description
The Mass Ornament today remains a refreshing tribute to popular culture, and its impressively interdisciplinary writings continue to shed light not only on Kracauer's later work but also on the ideas of the Frankfurt School, the genealogy of film theory and cultural studies, Weimar cultural politics, and, not least, the exigencies of intellectual exile.

The Curious Humanist

The Curious Humanist PDF Author: Johannes von Moltke
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520290941
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
"Siegfried Kracauer is today considered one of the key thinkers of the twentieth century. During the Weimar Republic, he established himself as a trenchant theorist of film, culture, and modernity, now often ranked alongside his friends Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno. When he arrived in Manhattan aboard a crowded refugee ship in 1941, however, he was virtually unknown in the United States and had yet to write his best-known books, From Caligari to Hitler and Theory of Film. In this study, Johannes von Moltke details the intricate ways in which the American intellectual and political context shaped Kracauer's seminal contributions to film studies and shows how Kracauer's American writings helped shape the emergent discipline in turn. Through archival sources and detailed readings of Kracauer's work, von Moltke reconstructs what it means to consider Siegfried Kracauer as the New York Intellectual he became when he settled in Manhattan for the last quarter century of his life. Here, he found an institutional home at the MoMA film library, contributed to communications and propaganda research under the aegis of the Rockefeller Foundation, and published in the influential "little magazines" of the New York Intellectuals. Adopting a transatlantic perspective on Kracauer's work, von Moltke demonstrates how he pursued questions that animated contemporary critics from Adorno to Hannah Arendt, from Clement Greenberg to Robert Warshow: questions about the origins of totalitarianism and the authoritarian personality, about high and low culture, about liberalism, democracy, and what it means to be human. From these wide-flung conversations and debates, Kracauer's own voice emerges as that of an incisive cultural critic invested in a humanist understanding of the cinema."--Provided by publisher.

Cinema and Experience

Cinema and Experience PDF Author: Miriam Hansen
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520265599
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 406

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Book Description
Kracauer. Film, medium of a disintegrating world. -- Curious Americanism. -- Benjamin. Actuality, antinomies. -- Aura: the appropriation of a concept. -- Mistaking the moon for a ball. -- Micky-maus. -- Room-for-play. -- Adorno. The question of film aesthetics. -- Kracauer in exile. Theory of film.

Theory of Film

Theory of Film PDF Author: Siegfried Kracauer
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 9780691037042
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 492

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Book Description
This study explores the distinctive qualities of the cinematic medium. It includes an introduction which examines "Theory of Film" in the context of Kracauer's extensive film criticism from the 1920s, and provides a framework for appreciating its significance in contemporary film theory.

Reluctant Skeptic

Reluctant Skeptic PDF Author: Harry T. Craver
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 178533459X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
The journalist and critic Siegfried Kracauer is best remembered today for his investigations of film and other popular media, and for his seminal influence on Frankfurt School thinkers like Theodor Adorno. Less well known is his earlier work, which offered a seismographic reading of cultural fault lines in Weimar-era Germany, with an eye to the confrontation between religious revival and secular modernity. In this discerning study, historian Harry T. Craver reconstructs and richly contextualizes Kracauer’s early output, showing how he embodied the contradictions of modernity and identified the quasi-theological impulses underlying the cultural ferment of the 1920s.

From Caligari to Hitler

From Caligari to Hitler PDF Author: Siegfried Kracauer
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691191344
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 432

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Book Description
An essential work of the cinematic history of the Weimar Republic by a leading figure of film criticism First published in 1947, From Caligari to Hitler remains an undisputed landmark study of the rich cinematic history of the Weimar Republic. Prominent film critic Siegfried Kracauer examines German society from 1921 to 1933, in light of such movies as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, M, Metropolis, and The Blue Angel. He explores the connections among film aesthetics, the prevailing psychological state of Germans in the Weimar era, and the evolving social and political reality of the time. Kracauer makes a startling (and still controversial) claim: films as popular art provide insight into the unconscious motivations and fantasies of a nation. With a critical introduction by Leonardo Quaresima which provides context for Kracauer’s scholarship and his contributions to film studies, this Princeton Classics edition makes an influential work available to new generations of cinema enthusiasts.

Kracauer

Kracauer PDF Author: Jörg Später
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1509533036
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 579

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Book Description
Siegfried Kracauer was one of the most important German thinkers of the twentieth century. His writings on Weimar culture, mass society, photography and film were groundbreaking and they anticipated many of the themes later developed members of the Frankfurt School and other cultural theorists. No less remarkable were the circumstances under which he made these contributions. After his early years as a journalist in Germany, the rise of the Nazis forced Kracauer into exile – first in Paris and then, after a protracted flight via Marseilles and Lisbon, to the United States. The existential challenges, personal losses and unrelenting hardship Kracauer faced during these years of exile formed the backdrop against which he offered his acute observations of modern life. Jörg Später provides the first comprehensive biography of this extraordinary man. Based on extensive archival research, Später’s biography expertly traces the key influences on Kracauer’s intellectual development and presents his most important works and ideas with great clarity. At the same time, Später ably documents the intensity of Kracauer’s personal relationships, the trauma of his flight and exile, and his embrace of his new homeland, where, finally, the ‘groundlessness’ of refugee existence gave way to a more stable life and, with it, some of the intellectually most fruitful years of Kracauer’s career. The result is a vivid portrait of a man driven both by an urge to capture reality – to attend to the things that are ‘overlooked or misjudged’, that still ‘lack a name’, as he put it – and by a need to find his place in a hostile, threatening world.