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Gertrud Koch, A curious realism: redeeming Kracauer’s film theory through Whitehead’s process philosophy, Screen, Volume 61, Issue 2, Summer 2020, Pages 280–287, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/hjaa024
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This essay returns to the troubled concept of nature in classical film theory, as exemplified by Siegfried Kracauer’s critical encounter with Alfred North Whitehead in his postwar writings. By re-reading Kracauer alongside Whitehead, I seek to elucidate the critical tangle between philosophical notions of realism, reality and materiality, while exploring the implications of this amalgamation for Kracauer’s theory of film. Does film inevitably subvert the concept of nature by its own technicality, and does it thereby imply a nature that is no longer defined in simple opposition to culture? In an attempt to answer these questions, I wish to recontextualize notions important to Kracauer’s theory of film, such as ‘life’, ‘things’ and ‘physical reality’, within Whitehead’s conceptual system. My intervention thus proceeds from the philosophical notions in themselves and extends to their way of grounding film-theoretical approaches. These reflections lead me to the question of which critical terms and ideas might come up once the nature/realism paradigm shows its limits. A concept of materialism is the key to this task: filmic materiality encloses physical reality together with the social fabric; its ‘things’ are part of – and reflect – the entwinement of nature and culture. A new theory of cinematic materialism will have to attend to ‘first and second nature’ together, and look for the ‘material’ of film in an aesthetics that combines the ‘somatic’ with socio-semiotics. The purpose of this essay is not to accomplish this theoretical feat, or to project a systematic vision; it simply discusses some neglected aspects of Kracauer’s thought and conceptual framework that might provide a glimpse, on some key points, of an ecological program for film theory.
