Siegfried Kracauer's American Writings
Essays on Film and Popular Culture
by Siegfried Kracauer, Johannes von Moltke and Kristy Rawson
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Book Presentation:
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 émigré intellectual.
About the authors:
Siegfried Kracauer (1889-1966) was a member of the Frankfurt School, and is considered one of the great film critics of the 20th century.
Johannes von Moltke is Associate Professor of German Studies and Screen Arts and Cultures at the University of Michigan, author of No Place Like Home: Locations of Heimat in German Cinema, (UC Press).
Kristy Rawson is a graduate student in Screen Arts & Cultures at Michigan.
Press Reviews:
"[A] fine work. . . . Editors of this new collection have wisely chosen to include several dispatches that Kracauer ?led from New York . . . published here for the ?rst time in English."— Film Comment
"[These collected essays] insist on a kind of ethical imperative of film criticism. . . . There is an urgency in these pieces to convey exactly how powerful what he called "those movies with a message" could be."— Los Angeles Review Of Books
"American Writings shows that Kracauer was much more than a film reviewer, a cultural critic keenly attuned to the interplay of culture and politics as they collided on the cinema screen."— Times Literary Supplement (TLS)
"This edition is quite informative. . . . The three editors of this edition –– Johannes von Moltke, Kristy Rawson and Martin Jay –– have added some fifty pages of introduction to this bulk of Kracauer’s output that smoothly guides through the many facets of this important character."— popcultureshelf.com
"We know Siegfried Kracauer as a brilliant Weimar essayist, a Frankfurt School fellow traveler, and a pioneering postwar film theorist. This collection of his American writings uncovers fascinating corners of his film and cultural criticism, firmly placing him in the context of the New York Intellectuals as well."—Peter Decherney, author of Hollywood's Copyright Wars: From Edison to the Internet.
> From the same authors:
From Caligari to Hitler (2019)
A Psychological History of the German Film
Culture in the Anteroom (2012)
The Legacies of Siegfried Kracauer
Dir. Gerd Gemünden and Johannes von Moltke
Subject: Theory
No Place Like Home (2005)
Locations of Heimat in German Cinema
> On a related topic:
Cinematic Realism (2020)
Lukács, Kracauer and Theories of the Filmic Real
by Ian Aitken
Subject: Theory
Cinema and Experience (2011)
Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno
Dir. Miriam Bratu Hansen
Subject: Theory
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