Modernity, history and emancipation in Siegfried Kracauer’s Theory of Film
Keywords:
Critical Theory., Modernity., Rationalization., Crisis of Experience, Contingency.Abstract
This paper analyzes S. Kracauer’s Theory of Film, in terms of the definition of a non-systematic critical theory of modernity. Far from an aesthetic theory of the cinematographic medium, this approach makes a deep criticism against the historically peculiar forms assumed by the modern experience. Kracauer defines cinema as the expression of a paradoxical society, which exposes both its mechanisms of oppression, and the emancipatory potentials that are immanent to it. In short, Kracauer’s approach to cinema points to the possible transformation of the present towards a post-metaphysical organization of the social world.
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