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Siegfried Kracauer stands out as one of the most significant
theorists and critics of the twentieth century, acclaimed for his
analyses of film and popular culture. However, his writing on
propaganda and politics has been overshadowed by the works of his
contemporaries and colleagues associated with the Frankfurt School.
This book brings together a broad selection of Kracauer's work on
media and political communication, much of it previously
unavailable in English. It features writings spanning more than two
decades, from studies of totalitarian propaganda written in the
1930s to wartime work on Nazi newsreels and anti-Semitism through
to examinations of American and Soviet political messaging in the
early Cold War period. These varied texts illuminate the interplay
among politics, mass culture, and the media, and they encompass
Kracauer's core concerns: the individual and the masses, the
conditions of cultural production, and the critique of modernity.
The introduction and afterword explore the significance of
Kracauer's contributions to critical theory, film and media
studies, and the analysis of political communication both in his
era and the present day. At a time when demagoguery and bigotry
loom over world politics, Kracauer's inquiries into topics such as
the widespread appeal of fascist propaganda and the relationship of
new media forms and technologies to authoritarianism are strikingly
relevant.
Siegfried Kracauer stands out as one of the most significant
theorists and critics of the twentieth century, acclaimed for his
analyses of film and popular culture. However, his writing on
propaganda and politics has been overshadowed by the works of his
contemporaries and colleagues associated with the Frankfurt School.
This book brings together a broad selection of Kracauer's work on
media and political communication, much of it previously
unavailable in English. It features writings spanning more than two
decades, from studies of totalitarian propaganda written in the
1930s to wartime work on Nazi newsreels and anti-Semitism through
to examinations of American and Soviet political messaging in the
early Cold War period. These varied texts illuminate the interplay
among politics, mass culture, and the media, and they encompass
Kracauer's core concerns: the individual and the masses, the
conditions of cultural production, and the critique of modernity.
The introduction and afterword explore the significance of
Kracauer's contributions to critical theory, film and media
studies, and the analysis of political communication both in his
era and the present day. At a time when demagoguery and bigotry
loom over world politics, Kracauer's inquiries into topics such as
the widespread appeal of fascist propaganda and the relationship of
new media forms and technologies to authoritarianism are strikingly
relevant.
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.
A biography of composer Jacques Offenbach that is also a social and
cultural history of Second Empire Paris. Siegfried Kracauer's
biography of the composer Jacques Offenbach is a remarkable work of
social and cultural history. First published in German in 1937 and
in English translation in 1938, the book uses the life and work of
Offenbach as a focal point for a broad and penetrating portrayal of
Second Empire Paris. Offenbach's immensely popular operettas have
long been seen as part of the larger historical amnesia and
escapism that pervaded Paris in the aftermath of 1848. But Kracauer
insists that Offenbach's productions must be understood as more
than glittering distractions. The fantasy realms of such operettas
as La Belle Helene were as one with the unreality of Napoleon III's
imperial masquerade, but they also made a mockery of the pomp and
pretense surrounding the apparatuses of power. At the same time,
Offenbach's dreamworlds were embedded with a layer of utopian
content that can be seen as an indictment of the fraudulence and
corruption of the times. This edition includes Kracauer's preface
to the original German edition as well as a critical foreword by
Gertrud Koch.
Siegfried Kracauer was one of the twentieth century's most
brilliant cultural critics, a daring and prolific scholar, and an
incisive theorist of film. In this volume his finest writings on
modern society make their long-awaited appearance in English.
This book is a celebration of the masses--their tastes,
amusements, and everyday lives. Taking up themes of modernity, such
as isolation and alienation, urban culture, and the relation
between the group and the individual, Kracauer explores a
kaleidoscope of topics: shopping arcades, the cinema, bestsellers
and their readers, photography, dance, hotel lobbies, Kafka, the
Bible, and boredom. For Kracauer, the most revelatory facets of
modern life in the West lie on the surface, in the ephemeral and
the marginal. Of special fascination to him is the United States,
where he eventually settled after fleeing Germany and whose culture
he sees as defined almost exclusively by "the ostentatious display
of surface."
With these essays, written in the 1920s and early 1930s and
edited by the author in 1963, Kracauer was the first to demonstrate
that studying the everyday world of the masses can bring great
rewards. "The Mass Ornament" today remains a refreshing tribute to
popular culture, and its impressively interdisciplinary essays
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.
In his introduction, Thomas Levin situates Kracauer in a
turbulent age, illuminates the forces that influenced
him--including his friendships with Walter Benjamin, TheodorAdorno,
and other Weimar intellectuals--and provides the context necessary
for understanding his ideas. Until now, Kracauer has been known
primarily for his writings on the cinema. This volume brings us the
full scope of his gifts as one of the most wide-ranging and
penetrating interpreters of modern life.
"Kracauer's profound theoretical investigation revealed film as the
form that best captured the new modes of experience that
characterize modernity. 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."--Tom
Gunning, University of Chicago
"Just as new translations of Kracauer's early works have begun
to reveal aspects of his intellectual project previously
unavailable to readers of English, this most welcome new edition of
Kracauer's magnum opus of media aesthetics will cast a new
interpretative light on his later work, thanks especially to Miriam
Hansen's highly illuminating introductory essay."--Thomas Y. Levin,
Princeton University
"The late Siegfried Kracauer was best known as a historian and
critic of the cinema. His main intellectual preoccupation during
the last years of his life was the relation between past and
present, and the relation between histories in different levels of
generality. Philosophy is concerned with the last things while
history seeks to explain 'the last things before the last.' One
after another he examined various theories of history and exposed
their strengths and weaknesses. Well written and cogently argued."
--Library Journal This edition features a new introduction by
editor Paul Oskar Kristeller of Columbia University.
Siegfried Kracauer (1889OCo1966), 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 (r)migr(r) intellect
Siegfied Kracauer, De Caligari a Hitler: este nombre y este titulo
han sido durante mucho tiempo punto de referencia obligado para
todos aquellos que se dedican a estudiar el cine como un arte del
siglo xx. En su libro, Kracauer aborda el periodo mas rico y
espectacular del cine aleman y, por extension, uno de los mas
importantes del cine mundial: el que va de 1919, ano de la
aparicion de El gabinete del Dr. Caligari, a 1933, ano de la subida
al poder de Adolf Hitler. Es el periodo del expresionismo, de la
formacion de un lenguaje, de la consolidacion de un arte que
Kracauer analiza desde un punto de vista nuevo: el que le ofrecen
los utiles teoricos del marxismo y el psicoanalisis. Historiador,
teorico y filosofo, Kracauer fue critico de cine durante los anos
1919-1933, lo que le permitio vivir directamente el desarrollo del
arte cinematografico en relacion a la evolucion de una cultura y
una sociedad especificas, las de la Alemania de la Republica de
Weimar. Sus trabajos sobre la propaganda nazi en el cine aleman,
realizados en Estados Unidos, donde encontro refugio al
consolidarse el poder hitleriano, le condujeron a buscar los
antecedentes filmicos del nazismo en los filmes realizados durante
los anos veinte. De ahi surgio el impresionante trabajo que ahora
se presenta en Espana.
First published in 1930, Siegfried Kracauer's work was greeted with
great acclaim and soon attained the status of a classic. The object
of his inquiry was the new class of salaried employees who
populated the cities of Weimar Germany. Spiritually homeless,
divorced from all custom and tradition, these white-collar workers
sought refuge in entertainment-or the "distraction industries," as
Kracauer put it-but, only three years later, were to flee into the
arms of Adolf Hitler. Eschewing the instruments of traditional
sociological scholarship, but without collapsing into mere
journalistic reportage, Kracauer explores the contradictions of
this caste. Drawing on conversations, newspapers, adverts and
personal correspondence, he charts the bland horror of the
everyday. In the process he succeeds in writing not just a
prescient account of the declining days of the Weimar Republic, but
also a path-breaking exercise in the sociology of culture which has
sharp relevance for today.
Siegfried Kracauer (1889OCo1966), 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 (r)migr(r) intellect
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