Siegfried Kracauer s American Writings

2012-06

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: ...

Author: Siegfried Kracauer

Publisher: Univ of California Press

ISBN: 9780520271821

Category: Performing Arts

Page: 290

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“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

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.

Author: Johannes Von Moltke

Publisher:

ISBN: OCLC:794545244

Category:

Page: 305

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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.
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The Curious Humanist

2016-06-21

These writings are now available in Siegfried Kracauer's American Writings:
Essays on Film and Popular Culture, ed. Johannes von Moltke and Kristy
Rawson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012). See also Isenberg, “This
Pen for ...

Author: Johannes von Moltke

Publisher: Univ of California Press

ISBN: 9780520290938

Category: Performing Arts

Page: 336

View: 529

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Introduction: Siegfried Kracauer and the politics of film theory -- Metropolitan contact zones: Kracauer in New York -- Totalitarian propaganda -- Nazi cinema -- Freedom from fear? -- From Hitler to Caligari: spaces of Weimar cinema -- Authoritarian, totalitarian -- Reframing Caligari: the politics of cinema -- Theory of film and the subject of experience -- The curious humanist -- History and humanist subjectivity -- Epilogue: Siegfried Kracauer and the emergence of film studies

Continental Strangers

2014-01-21

A Directors Guild of America Oral History. Metuchen, N.J.: ... Culture in the
Anteroom: The Legacies of Siegfried Kracauer. Ann Arbor: University of ...
Siegfried Kracauer's American Writings: Essays on Film and Popular Culture.
Berkeley: ...

Author: Gerd Gemünden

Publisher: Columbia University Press

ISBN: 9780231536523

Category: History

Page: 296

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Hundreds of German-speaking film professionals took refuge in Hollywood during the 1930s and 1940s, making a lasting contribution to American cinema. Hailing from Austria, Hungary, Poland, Russia, and the Ukraine, as well as Germany, and including Ernst Lubitsch, Fred Zinnemann, Billy Wilder, and Fritz Lang, these multicultural, multilingual writers and directors betrayed distinct cultural sensibilities in their art. Gerd Gemünden focuses on Edgar G. Ulmer's The Black Cat (1934), William Dieterle's The Life of Emile Zola (1937), Ernst Lubitsch's To Be or Not to Be (1942), Bertolt Brecht and Fritz Lang's Hangmen Also Die (1943), Fred Zinnemann's Act of Violence (1948), and Peter Lorre's Der Verlorene (1951), engaging with issues of realism, auteurism, and genre while tracing the relationship between film and history, Hollywood politics and censorship, and exile and (re)migration.

Escape to Life

2012-05-29

Siegfried Kracauer: The Film Historian in Exile1 Anton Kaes One of the
foundational works of film history, Siegfried ... which owns the rights to Siegfried
Kracauer's German works and presently oversees the rights to his American
writings, ...

Author: Eckart Goebel

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

ISBN: 9783110258684

Category: Literary Criticism

Page: 561

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After 1933, New York City gave shelter to many leading German and German-Jewish intellectuals. Stripped of their German citizenship by the Nazi-regime, these public figures either stayed in the New York area or moved on to California and other places. This compendium, adopting the title of a famous volume published by Klaus and Erika Mann in 1939, explores the impact the US, and NYC in particular, had on these authors as well as the influence they in turn exerted on US intellectual life. Moreover, it addresses the transformations that took place in the exiled intellectuals’ thinking when it was translated into another language and addressed to an American audience. Among the individuals presented in this volume, are such prominent names as T.W. Adorno, H. Arendt, W. Benjamin, E. Bloch, B. Brecht, S. Kracauer, the Mann family, S. Morgenstern, and E. Panofsky. The authors of the essays in this compendium were free to choose the angle (biography, theory, politics) or aspect (a single work, a personal constellation) deemed best to illuminate the given intellectual’s work. Acclaimed NYC photographer Fred Stein, a German-Jewish refugee from Dresden, produced numerous portraits of exiled intellectuals and artists. A selection of these compelling portraits is reproduced in this book for the first time.

Hitler Films from Germany

2012-11-30

She is currently working on a booklength study of the representation of
IstanbulinGerman literature and film. ... of Siegfried Kracauer and, with Kristy
Rawson, of the forthcoming Affinities: Siegfried Kracauer's American Writings
1941–1966.

Author: K. Machtans

Publisher: Springer

ISBN: 9781137032386

Category: History

Page: 300

View: 835

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The first book-length study to critically examine the recent wave of Hitler biopics in German cinema and television. A group of international experts discuss films like Downfall in the context of earlier portrayals of Hitler and draw out their implications for the changing place of the Third Reich in the national historical imagination.

The Mass Ornament

1995

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 ...

Author: Siegfried Kracauer

Publisher: Harvard University Press

ISBN: 067455163X

Category: Social Science

Page: 403

View: 782

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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.

Theory of Film

1997

Miriam Hansen's brilliant introduction chronicles the work's genesis and transformation through Kracauer's conversations with Adorno and Benjamin, his flight from the Nazis, and his uneasy assimilation into the Cold-War United States.

Author: Siegfried Kracauer

Publisher: Princeton University Press

ISBN: 0691037043

Category: Performing Arts

Page: 364

View: 227

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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.

Weimar Effects

2010

from his later American ones , as Patrice Petro suggests ' , but also points to a
significant reconsideration of German ... Quoted in Heide Schluepmann's “
Phenomonology of Film : On Siegfried Kracauer's Writings of the 1920's , " New
German ...

Author: Isa Murdock-Hinrichs

Publisher:

ISBN: UCSD:31822009476599

Category: Expressionism in motion pictures

Page: 402

View: 624

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Thought images

2007

Frankfurt School Writers' Reflections from Damaged Life Gerhard Richter ...
EXTRATERRITORIALITY , DERRIDA'S MONOLINGUALISM OF THE OTHER
There are always holes in the wall for us to ... -Siegfried Kracauer , History From
this shore , yes , from this shore or this common drift , all expatriations remain
singular .

Author: Gerhard Richter

Publisher: Stanford University Press

ISBN: 0804756171

Category: Philosophy

Page: 233

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In this book, Gerhard Richter explores the aesthetic and political ramifications of the literary genre of the Denkbild, or thought-image, as it was employed by four major German-Jewish writers and philosophers of the first half of the twentieth century: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, and Siegfried Kracauer. The Denkbild is a poetic mode of writing, a brief snapshot-in-prose that stages the interrelation of literary, philosophical, political, and cultural insights. Richter's careful analysis of the linguistic characteristics of this mode of writing sheds new light on pivotal concerns of modernity, including the fractured cityscape, philosophical problems of modern music, the experience of exiled homelessness, and the disaster of Auschwitz. Thought-Images not only reorients our understanding of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory in important ways but also establishes significant links between these writers and contemporary French thinkers such as Jacques Derrida.

Aftershocks of the New

2002

... Siegfried Kracauer ' s reputation in film theory rested upon the two books he
wrote in English : From Caligari to Hitler ... 1 These two books , which established
Kracauer as a major , if fundamentally flawed , thinker on film , have frequently
been compared to the essays and more aphoristic writings of the French film
theorist Andre Bazin , who shared Kracauer ' s ... In Andrew ' s account , Bazin is
upheld CHAPTER THREE GERMAN FILM THEORY AND ANGLO-AMERICAN
FILM ...

Author: Patrice Petro

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

ISBN: 0813529964

Category: Performing Arts

Page: 215

View: 166

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Essays exploring the debates over the place of cinema within the culture of modernity by a leading cultural critic.

Cinema and Experience

2012

Her analysis provides the contours of a theory of cinema and experience that speaks to questions being posed anew as moving-image culture evolves in response to digital technology.

Author: Miriam Bratu Hansen

Publisher: Univ of California Press

ISBN: 9780520265592

Category: Performing Arts

Page: 380

View: 758

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"Like a careful gardener, Miriam Hansen planted and interwove traditions of Frankfurt critical theory, modern film history, and her own critical passions and curiosity. She is an important transatlantic bridge for the traditions of enlightenment and film art. She was not only a theoretical mind, but someone who also exerted a strong, practical influence on filmmaking. Because of her, the Minutenfilm saw a rebirth, as well as film projected onto multiple screens, the Max Ophuls renaissance, and much more. We auteurs listened to her. She was--as she sat in her Chicago office and worked, occasionally glancing over the lake--our prophet." --Alexander Kluge, "Berlin Journal" ""Cinema and Experience" is a doubly poignant book: simultaneously a soulful investigation into the complex fate of experience in a mass-mediated modernity and the posthumous publication of the culminating masterwork of one the master scholars of cinema studies. Rich and probing insights resonate from every page of this wonderful volume." --Dana Polan, author of "Scenes of Instruction: The Beginnings of the U.S. Study of Film" "Miriam Hansen's brilliant analysis of the cinematic experience combines a democratic respect for mass culture with the highest standards of scholarly excellence. Mickey Mouse, slapstick comedy, the photographic image and filmed reality become her keys to deciphering the philosophical differences between Adorno and Benjamin, and the philosophical significance of Kracauer's journalistic eye. The present--new media, social networking, drone warfare--is never out of her sight. For the beginning student and the advanced scholar in multiple disciplines, Hansen's writing is a gift, and a roadmap to every relevant scholarly debate. This is an indispensable book by an irreplaceable author. We shall miss her." --Susan Buck-Morss, author of "The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project" "Miriam Hansen's study is the first comprehensive reconstruction of the complex theoretical frames in which Adorno, Benjamin, and Kracauer set their philosophical thoughts on film and cinema. Hansen's profound knowledge of the complete works of these influential thinkers allows her to relate questions of film and cinema aesthetics to the core thoughts of the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School in manifold and sometimes surprisingly new ways. This study will establish a new look at the Frankfurt School as well as on film theory in general." --Gertrud Koch, author of "Siegfried Kracauer: An Introduction" "In her posthumous book, Miriam Hansen offers novel readings, both subtle and robust, of Kracauer, Benjamin, and Adorno's reflections on cinema as experience, weaving often disconnected threads into a tapestry of common concepts and concerns that highlights closeness and distance between these writers in unexpected ways. What emerges is yet another Frankfurt School: Critical Theory as media aesthetics and theory of experience. The triangulation of Adorno and Benjamin with Kracauer permits her to think beyond the annoyingly persistent accounts pitting the Eurocentric mandarin against the progressive film and media theorist. The inspirational role of Kracauer for Benjamin is finally acknowledged and Kracauer is freed from the misunderstanding of his work on photography and film as a naive realism. And who but Miriam Hansen would have been able to link Benjamin's notion of aura--explicated in a much broadened discursive and political context--to Adorno's aesthetic of natural beauty? Thinking with Adorno beyond Adorno in modernist aesthetics, with Benjamin beyond Benjamin in media theory, with Kracauer beyond Kracauer on mass culture, she keeps the legacy of Critical Theory alive for an analysis of human experience and cultural practice in our age of digital media." --Andreas Huyssen, Columbia Unive

Rethinking Architecture

2005-12-20

German cultural theorist Siegfried Kracauer (1889–1966) is known principally for
his later writings on film theory, such as ... Forced out in 1933 under the growing
anti-semitism, he subsequently fled to America where he made a name for ...

Author: Neil Leach

Publisher: Routledge

ISBN: 9781134796298

Category: Architecture

Page: 432

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Brought together for the first time - the seminal writing on architecture by key philosophers and cultural theorist of the twentieth century. Issues around the built environment are increasingly central to the study of the social sciences and humanities. The essays offer a refreshing take on the question of architecture and provocatively rethink many of the accepted tenets of architecture theory from a broader cultural perspective. The book represents a careful selection of the very best theoretical writings on the ideas which have shaped our cities and our experiences of architecture. As such, Rethinking Architecture provides invaluable core source material for students on a range of courses.

German Studies in North America

2004

Universal Language and Democratic Culture : Myths of Origin in Early American
Cinema . ” In Myth and Enlightenment in American Literature . ... Decentric
Perspectives : Siegfried Kracauer ' s Early Writings on Film and Mass Culture .

Author: Keith Duane Alexander

Publisher:

ISBN: MINN:31951D023576586

Category: Civilization, Germanic

Page: 1165

View: 934

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Spatial Turns

2010-01

Eric Jarosinski Urban Mediations: The Theoretical Space of Siegfried Kracauer's
Ginster Siegfried Kracauer's notion that “reality is a ... the “mosaic”, this essay
argues that Kracauer challenges us to think of urban space as multiply mediated,
especially when it would seem to be ... as one of the Weimar-era's most sensitive
readers and equally perceptive writers, for whom his friends' question of “where?

Author: Jaimey Fisher

Publisher: Rodopi

ISBN: 9789042030015

Category: Literary Criticism

Page: 469

View: 648

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The phrase “spatial turns” signals the growing importance of space as an analytical as well as representational category for culture. The volume addresses such emerging modes of inquiry by bringing together, for the first time, essays that engage with spatial turns, spatiality, and the theoretical implications of both in the context of German culture, history, and theory. Migrating from fields like geography, urban studies, and architecture, the new centrality of space has transformed social-science fields as diverse as sociology, philosophy, and psychology. In cultural studies, productive analyses of space increasingly cut across the studies of literature, film, popular culture, and the visual arts.Spatial Turns brings together essays that apply a spatial analysis to German literature and other media and engages with specifically German theorizations of space by such figures as Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin.The volume is organized in four sections: “Mapping Spaces” addresses cartography in all forms and in its intersection with culture; “Spaces of the Urban” takes up one of the key sites of spatial studies, the city; “Spaces of Encounter” considers how Germany has become a contact zone for multiple ethnicities; and “Visualized Spaces” concerns the theorization of space in film and new media studies.

Screen

2000

10 Note that Kracauer refers to the Tiller Girls throughout the essay as American
Siegfried Kracauer , The mass ornament ' , in The Mass Ornament Weimar
Essays , trans . Thomas Y Levin ( Cambridge , MA .. Harvard University Press ,
1995 ) ...

Author:

Publisher:

ISBN: STANFORD:36105112366518

Category: Motion pictures

Page:

View: 754

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Hollywood and the American Historical Film

2012-01-17

Popular books about movies continued predictably to focus on personal stories
told through memoirs and biographies, ... Nathan Leites—was present-minded
and accepting of the status quo.2 Siegfried Kracauer's controversial 1947 study, ...

Author: J.E. Smyth

Publisher: Macmillan International Higher Education

ISBN: 9780230357891

Category: Performing Arts

Page: 272

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This definitive interdisciplinary collection by leading scholars probes the theoretical and historical contexts of films made about the American past, from silent film to the present. The book offers a fresh assessment of studio era historical filmmaking and its legacy across a range of genres.

Radical Philosophy

1972

On Kracauer's rejection of ' vulgar ' Marxism , see also Mülder , Siegfried
Kracauer , p . 60 , and Martin Jay , Permanent Exiles : Essays on the Intellectual
Migration from Germany to America , Columbia University Press , New York ,
1986 , pp .

Author:

Publisher:

ISBN: UOM:39015078934463

Category: Philosophy

Page:

View: 171

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Weimar Publics Weimar Subjects

2010

CHAPTER 12 “ A Self - Representation of the Masses " Siegfried Kracauer's
Curious Americanism MIRIAM HANSEN ' n ... Siegfried Kracauer contrasts the
small chorus lines of “ Girls ” and “ Boys ” with their American prototype and refers
to ...

Author: Kathleen Canning

Publisher: Berghahn Books

ISBN: 1845456890

Category: History

Page: 406

View: 747

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In spite of having been short-lived, "Weimar" has never lost its fascination. Until recently the Weimar Republic's place in German history was primarily defined by its catastrophic beginning and end - Germany's defeat in 1918 and the Nazi seizure of power in 1933; its history seen mainly in terms of politics and as an arena of flawed decisions and failed compromises. However, a flourishing of interdisciplinary scholarship on Weimar political culture is uncovering arenas of conflict and change that had not been studied closely before, such as gender, body politics, masculinity, citizenship, empire and borderlands, visual culture, popular culture and consumption. This collection offers new perspectives from leading scholars in the disciplines of history, art history, film studies, and German studies on the vibrant political culture of Germany in the 1920s. From the traumatic ruptures of defeat, revolution, and collapse of the Kaiser's state, the visionaries of Weimar went on to invent a republic, calling forth new citizens and cultural innovations that shaped the republic far beyond the realms of parliaments and political parties.

Essays on German American and English Literature

2007

... cured by psychoanalytical or quasipsychoanalytical methods ( Kracauer , 171 )
. Siegfried Kracauer ' s consummate praise for Pabst ' s SECRETS OF THE SOUL
in CALIGARI TO HITLER , which is a psychological history of the German film ...

Author: Eugene G. Miller

Publisher: University Press of Amer

ISBN: STANFORD:36105131711694

Category: Literary Criticism

Page: 87

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In Essays on German American and English Literature, author Eugene Miller offers literary criticism, from a theological and philosophical standpoint, of many of the great dramatists and novelists of world literature. Miller analyzes and discusses major works in German, American, and English literature in an authoritative and original manner.