The curious humanist : Siegfried Kracauer in America / Johannes von Moltke.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

von Moltke, Johannes, Author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Motion pictures--Germany--History.

Motion pictures.

Motion pictures--History.

Motion pictures--Political aspects.

Film critics--Germany--Biography.

Film critics.

Kracauer, Siegfried, 1889-1966--Criticism and interpretation.

Kracauer, Siegfried.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (333 p.)

Place of Publication:

Berkeley, CA : University of California Press, [2016]

Language Note:

English

Summary:

During the Weimar Republic, Siegfried Kracauer established himself as a trenchant theorist of film, culture, and modernity, and he is now considered one of the key thinkers of the twentieth century. 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. 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, in turn, Kracauer's American writings helped shape the emergent discipline. Using archival sources and detailed readings, von Moltke asks what it means to consider Kracauer as the New York Intellectual he became in the last quarter century of his life. Adopting a transatlantic perspective on Kracauer's work, von Moltke demonstrates how he pursued questions in conversation with contemporary critics from Theodor 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 debates, Kracauer's own voice emerges as that of an incisive cultural critic invested in a humanist understanding of the cinema.

Contents:

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.

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 24. Apr 2020)

ISBN:

9780520964853

0520964853

OCLC:

950459928