EDITORIAL

• Published in: New formations 2007-07 (61), p.7
• Main Author: Campbell, Jan
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund (1903-1969)
• ISSN: 0950-2378; 1741-0789

[...]Adorno seems to acknowledge Kracauer's contribution to his education: I am not exaggerating in the slightest when I say that I owe more to this reading than to my academic teachers. Theory of Film is concerned with the nature of'physical reality' and the critics who have seen the book as representative of an untroubled, positive realism have failed to take into account the phenomenology that informed Kracauer's earlier Weimar essays; a phenomenology that has not been abandoned in the later film project even though the historical stakes of such analysis have been altered. Tracing Kracauer's modernist notion of photography, as a signifier of alienated mass consciousness to it's role in Theory of Film, as an aesthetics redeeming the modern condition, Gualtieri reveals a crucial shift between Kracauer's early view of photography as a material technology of social reality and its later role in redeeming physical reality (and our homelessness) from the intellectual abstraction of technological capitalism. Furthermore, film addresses the unconscious wishes of the audience but also demonstrates the collective unconscious that is at work in its production. [...]film is never just the work of one individual but is always the creative production of a team of artists and technicians.