Cinema and Experience. Miriam HANSEN

city of Berlin, the “frontier” of America in Europe.⁹⁵ “Berlin is the place where one quickly forgets; indeed, it appears as if this city has a magical means of wiping out all memories. It is the present and puts its ambition into being absolutely present. . . . Elsewhere, too, the appearance of squares, company names, and stores change; but only in Berlin these transformations tear the past so radically from memory.”⁹⁶ This tendency is particularly relentless on the city’s major commercial boulevard, the Kurfürstendamm, which Kracauer dubs “street without memory.” Its façades, from which “the ornaments have been knocked off,” “now stand without a foothold in time and are a symbol of the ahistorical change that takes place behind them.”⁹⁷ The spatialization of time and memory into a seemingly timeless present, its uncoupling from temporality in the emphatic sense, blocks from public view any sites of actual decay, failure, and misery.

      Like Benjamin, Kracauer found a counterimage to contemporary Berlin in the city of Paris. There, the “web”—“maze,” “mesentry”—of streets allows him to be a real flâneur, to indulge in a veritable “street high” (Straßenrausch).⁹⁸ There, history is allowed to live on, and the present in turn has a glimmer of the past, inspiring memories “in which reality blends with the multistory [vielstöckigen] dream we have of it and garbage mingles with celestial constellations.”⁹⁹ There, the crowds are constantly in motion, circulating, unstable, unpredictable, an “improvised mosaic” that never congeals into “readable patterns.”¹⁰⁰ The impression of flux and liquidity in Kracauer’s writings on Paris is enhanced, again and again, by textual superimpositions of ocean imagery (reminiscent of Louis Aragon’s vision of the Passage de l’Opéra in Paris Peasant) and evocations of the maritime tradition and milieu. The Paris masses display a process of mingling that does not suppress gradations and heterogeneity and which goes so far that, as Kracauer somewhat naively asserts, even people of African descent can be at home—and be themselves—without being “jazzified” or otherwise exoticized.¹⁰¹ There, too, the effects of Americanization seem powerless, deflected into aesthetic surplus, as in the case of the electric advertisements that project undecipherable hieroglyphs onto the Paris sky: “It darts beyond the economy, and what was intended as advertising turns into an illumination. This is what happens when businessmen meddle with lighting effects.”¹⁰² In Kracauer’s play with literal and metaphoric senses of illumination, the aesthetic surplus eludes commercial intention and opens up a space for experience.

      Paris, for Kracauer, is also the city of surrealism and the site of a film production that stages the jinxed relations between people and things in ways different from films adapting to the regime of the stopwatch. In the films of René Clair, Jacques Feyder, and Jean Vigo, Kracauer praises a physiognomic capacity that endows inanimate objects—buildings, streets, furniture—with memory and speech, an argument that bridges Balázs’s film aesthetics with Benjamin’s notion of an “optical unconscious.”¹⁰³ It is this quality that Kracauer extols in the best Soviet films—for instance, when he refers to Dziga Vertov as a “surrealist artist who listens to the conversation that the died-away, disintegrated life conducts with waking things.”¹⁰⁴ The physiognomic aesthetics of such films makes them enact the surrealist objective to “render strange what is close to us and strip the existing of its familiar mask,” a formulation that echoes Benjamin’s trope of a “dialectical optic” in his 1929 essay on surrealism.¹⁰⁵ What is more, the films’ dreamlike, mnemonic power opens up a different temporality (different from both chronological-industrial time and the regularized pace of classical narrative films) and exposes the viewer to involuntary, physiologically experienced encounters with material contingency. Increasingly, however, Kracauer also took contemporary French filmmakers, especially Clair, to task for lapsing into sentimentality and artsiness and for their romantic opposition to mechanization.¹⁰⁶

      As much as it offered the German writer asylum from the reign of simultaneity, speed, and dehumanization, Paris was not the alternative to Berlin or, for that matter, “Amerika.” Nor did Kracauer—at least not until his “social biography” of Jacques Offenbach (1937)—seek to understand the crisis of contemporary mass modernity, as Benjamin did, in terms of the political legacy surrounding the emergence of mass culture in nineteenth-century France. For one thing, “Berlin” was already present in the topography of Paris, in the constellation of faubourgs and center (the latter corresponding to modernized Berlin) that he traces in his “Analysis of a City Map” (MO 41–44). For another, notwithstanding his alarm over the destruction in Germany of a basic civility that he found still existing in France,¹⁰⁷ Kracauer recognized that Berlin represented the inescapable horizon within which the contradictions of modernity demanded to be engaged. France was, after all, “Europe’s oasis” as far as the spread of rationalization and mass consumption was concerned, and Clair’s “embarrassing” spoof on the assembly line (in A nous la liberté) was only further proof of the French inability to understand “how deeply the mechanized process of labor reaches into our daily life.”¹⁰⁸

      In his first longer essay on the French capital, “Paris Observations” (1927), Kracauer assumes the perspective “from Berlin,” sketching the perceptions of someone who has lost confidence in the virtues of bourgeois life and who “even questions the sublimity of property,” who “has lived through the revolution [of 1919] as a democrat or its enemy,” and whose “every third word is America.” While he does not exactly identify with this persona, by the end of the essay he clearly rejects the possibility that French culture and civility could become a model for contemporary Germany. “The German cannot move into the well-warmed apartment that France represents to him today; but perhaps one day, France will be as homeless [obdachlos] as Germany.”¹⁰⁹ The price of Paris life and liveliness is the desolation and despair of the banlieu and the provinces that Kracauer describes in his unusually grim piece “The Town of Malakoff.” Contemplating Malakoff’s melancholy quarters, he finds, by contrast, even in the barbaric mélange of German industrial working-class towns signs of hope, protest, and a will toward change.¹¹⁰ When he returns from another trip to Paris in 1931, he is animated by a political conversation on the train, and as the train enters Berlin’s Bahnhof Zoo, the nightly city appears to him “more threatening and torn, more powerful, more reserved, and more promising than ever before.”¹¹¹ In its side-by-side of “harshness, openness . . . and glamour,” Berlin is not only the frontier of modernity but also “the center of struggles in which the human future is at stake.”¹¹²

      Paradoxically, the more relentlessly Kracauer criticizes the pathologies of mass-mediated modernity, the less he seems to subscribe to his earlier utopian thought that, someday, “America will disappear.” In fact, the more German film production cluttered the cinemas with costume dramas and operettas reviving nationalist and military myths, and the more the film industry accommodated to and promoted the political drift to the right, the more it became evident that America must not disappear, however mediocre, superficial, and inadequate its current mass-cultural output might be. The constellation that is vital to Kracauer’s understanding of cinema and modernity is therefore not that between Paris and Berlin, but that between a modernity that can reflect upon, revise, and regroup itself, albeit at the expense of (a certain kind of) memory, and a modernity that parlays technological presentness into the timelessness of a new megamyth: monumental nature, the heroic body, the re-armored mass ornament—in short, the kind of Nazi modernism exemplified by Albert Speer and Leni Riefenstahl.

      This constellation emerges from the juxtaposition of two vignettes that, like his writings on the circus, project the problems and possibilities of mass-mediated modernity onto an earlier institution of leisure culture, the Berlin Luna Park. In an article published on Bastille Day, 1928, Kracauer describes a roller coaster whose façade shows a painted skyline of Manhattan: “The workers, the small people, the employees who spend the week being oppressed by the city, now triumph by air over a super-Berlinian New York.” Once they’ve reached the top, however, the façade gives way to a bare “skeleton”:

      So this is New York—a painted surface and behind it nothingness? The small couples are enchanted and disenchanted at the same time. Not that they would dismiss the grandiose city painting as simply humbug; but they see through