Abstract

In his introduction to The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film, Barry Keith Grant 1 notes that Siegfried Kracauer’s From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film 2 is the book that inaugurated an interest in looking at more specific historical and social contexts to explain the functions that particular films have during certain periods of time. From Caligari to Hitler—originally published in 1947—argues that the characters and stories on a nation’s screens can be symptomatic of wider, social dispositions, and that films themselves can reflect, and even influence the course of future events. In Kracauer’s case, 1920s Weimar cinema carried the spectre of German fascism. Grant says the underlying assumptions of this work can be found in the later contentions of writers on horror cinema: [such] as those of T.J. Ross, who makes the more general claim that “the monster belongs to our age of moral and ecological chaos” or the more specific explanation of the rise of the “horror of personality” film in the context of the violent events, including a number of widely publicized multiple murders, that filled the news headlines in the early 1960s . While as Grant himself notes these kinds of ideological and social approaches to horror cinema have proved fruitful, I am interested in this paper to look at a number of essays Kracauer wrote on film and mass culture during the 1920s: “Cult of Distraction”, “Calico-World: The UFA city in Neubabelsberg” and “Boredom”. These essays were not published in English until 1975 and have had far less impact upon film studies in the English speaking world than aforementioned texts such as From Caligari to Hitler. Moreover, as Thomas Elsaesser 5 and Miriam Hansen 6 have both noted, these early essays reflect Kracauer’s sensibilist approach to cinema. What they mean is that Kracauer in these early essays is particularly sensitive to the aesthetic form that is internal to cinema as a medium and to the spectator’s immanent experience of this internal form. Such an experience still has an ideological dimension for Kracauer, but not one based on the allegorical function of films or on the social messages they communicate: both of which dominate Kracauer’s texts