Theory of film : the redemption of physical reality (1960)

PREFACE xi be the more cinematic, the less they focus directly on inward life, ideology, and spiritual concerns. This explains why many people with strong cultural leanings scorn the cinema. They are afraid lest its undeniable penchant for externals might tempt us to neglect our highest aspirations in the kaleidoscopic sights of ephemeral outward appearances. The cinema, says Valery, diverts the spectator from the core of his being. Plausible as this verdict sounds, it strikes me as unhistorical and superficial because it fails to do justice to the human condition in our time. Perhaps our condition is such that we cannot gain access to the elusive essentials of life unless we assimilate the seemingly non-essential? Perhaps the way today leads from, and through, the corporeal to the spiritual? And perhaps the cinema helps us to move from "below" to "above?" It is indeed my contention that film, our contemporary, has a definite bearing on the era into which it is born; that it meets our inmost needs precisely by exposing— for the first time, as it were— outer reality and thus deepening, in Gabriel Marcel's words, our relation to "this Earth which is our habitat." These few hints will have to do, for there is no short cut to the observations and thoughts on which my contention is based. I have tried to unfold them in the last chapter, which both completes and transcends the preceding aesthetic considerations. In fact, it reaches far beyond film proper. Just as, throughout the book, numbers of movies are analyzed with a view to exemplifying various points of my theory, so, in this chapter, the cinema itself is set in the perspective of something more general— an approach to the world, a mode of human existence. Let me conclude with a personal reminiscence. I was still a young boy when I saw my first film. The impression it made upon me must have been intoxicating, for I there and then determined to commit my experience to writing. To the best of my recollection, this was my earliest literary project. Whether it ever materialized, I have forgotten. But I have not forgotten its long-winded title, which, back home from the moviehouse, I immediately put on a shred of paper. Film as the Discoverer of the Marvels of Everyday Life, the title read. And I remember, as if it were today, the marvels themselves. What thrilled me so deeply was an ordinary suburban street, filled with lights and shadows which transfigured it. Several trees stood about, and there was in the foreground a puddle reflecting invisible house facades and a piece of the sky. Then a breeze moved the shadows, and the facades with the sky below began to waver. The trembling upper world in the dirty puddle— this image has never left me. T _ rt_ _ Siegfried Kracauer June 1960 New York City