Bøker av Siegfried Kracauer

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"When World War I breaks out, a young architecture student in Munich does everything in his power to avoid being enlisted into the German military in this perceptive, wickedly humorous novel by a prominent twentieth-century writer, journalist, and film critic. Siegfried Kracauer's Ginster is the great World War I novel you've never heard of. Here, the sheer horrors are kept offstage, as in Greek tragedy, and merely reported from time to time. The setting is the German home front. Its Chaplinesque antihero-Ginster-spends the war gumming up the German war machine as he maneuvers to stay out of its clutches and save his own skin. Which he does; however, there is a deeper struggle going on between Ginster's dreamy self-absorption and the pitiless organization of society, war or no war. Ginster has no wish to do anything. Alas, his reveries are forever being interrupted by the demands of an other-minded world. All the scenes of Ginster are well to the rear of the military action, yet with Kracauer narrating, military language saturates all aspects of civilian life in the homeland. Ginster's nearest and dearest are so gung-ho, he feels that he's at the front when he visits them. War, the author seems to say, is merely ordinary life seen from the back instead of the front. As a new European war darkens our horizon, one no more expected than was World War I, Kracauer's novel feels timelier than ever"--

This significant study is certain to be the standard work on the subject for many years to come. It demonstrates once and for all that motion pictures differ radically from the traditional arts, and that good plays or novels rarely make good films. Dr. Kracauer is concerned with film as a photographic medium uniquely equipped to capture and reveal the everyday world as it exists before our eyes. "If film is an art," he writes, "it is an art with a difference. It fulfills itself in rendering 'the ripple of leaves,' . . . street crowds, involuntary gestures, and other fleeting impressions."Dr. Kracauer covers every aspect of black-and-white film. He discusses its background in still photography, the problems inherent in historical and fantasy films, the novel as a cinematic form, experimental films, documentaries, the role of the actor, the uses of dialogue and sound, the contribution of music, and the part played by the spectator.The final chapter focuses on the wider implications of the medium. There Dr. Kracauer sets the cinema "in the perspective of something more general-an approach to the world, a mode of human existence," and thus shows how it reflects the condition of modern man, the moral temper of our society. Theory of Film is an intellectual experience which reaches far beyond film into the realm of general aesthetics and philosophy.

This book brings together a broad selection of Siegfried Kracauer's work on media and political communication, much of it previously unavailable in English. It features writings spanning more than two decades, from the 1930s to the early Cold War period.

A study of the cinematic history of the Weimar Republic. It examines German history from 1921 to 1933 in light of such movies as "The Cabinet of Dr Caligari", "M", "Metropolis", and "The Blue Angel". It is suitable for the film historian, film theorist, or cinema enthusiast.

First published in 1930, this work has as its subject of inquiry the new class of salaried employees who populated the cities of Weimar Germany. Drawing on conversations, newspapers, adverts and personal correspondence, it charts the bland horror of the everyday.

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 Hélène 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.

Siegfried Kracauer was one of the foremost representatives of the Frankfurt School of critical theory. This book brings together Kracauer's essays on photography that he wrote between 1927 and 1933 as a journalist for the Frankfurter Zeitung, as well as an essay that appeared in the Magazine of Art after the eminent emigre's exile to America.

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 emigre intellectual.

A study of the relationship between past and present, and the relation between histories in different levels of generality. One after another Siegfried Kracauer examines various theories of history and exposes their strengths and weaknesses.

Explores the distinctive qualities of the cinematic medium. This book takes its place alongside works in classical film theory by such figures as Bela Balazs, Rudolf Arnheim, and Andre Bazin, among others, and has met with much critical dispute.

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 celebrates the masses-their tastes, amusements, and everyday lives.