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Kracauer’s Photography Essay Dot Matrix—General (An-)Archive—Film Miriam Bratu Hansen A common reading of Kracauer’s 1927 essay “Photography” takes its most important insight to be the opposition between the photographic image and the memory image, including the claim that the proliferation of technologically produced images threatens the very possibility and truth-character of images preserved by memory.1 Against such a reading, which effectively assimilates Kracauer to a genealogy of media pessimism (from Baudelaire and Proust through Virilio and Baudrillard), I contend that the essay’s radical insights lie elsewhere. For Kracauer does not simply puncture the ideologically available assumption that the meaning of photographs is given in their analog, iconic relation to the object depicted; rather, he examines how meanings are constituted at the pragmatic level, in the usage and circulation of photographic images in both domestic and public media practices. Another, equally far-reaching concern of the essay is with the aging and afterlife of photographs, the transformation they undergo over time, especially once they have lost their original reference and presence effect. In the precarious temporality and historicity of photography , its alienation from human intention and control, Kracauer traces a countervailing potential, neither positivistic nor nostalgic, that he believes can be actualized in the medium of ‹lm. It is this potential that places photography at the crossroads of modernity: “The turn to photography is the go-for-broke game [Vabanque-Spiel] of history.”2 The question of historicity no less concerns the aging and afterlife of this text itself. It takes the by now ritual form of asking whether and how an essay that emphatically seeks to theorize photography in relation to the historical moment—Weimar democracy between economic stabilization and crisis, the larger trajectory of technological capitalist modernity—can speak 93 to a present in which the photographic paradigm, to the extent that it props its claims to authenticity and accuracy onto an indexical (physical or existential ) relation with the object depicted (the registration of re›ected light on a photochemical surface at a particular point in space and time), seems to have been radically displaced and reframed by digital modes of imaging.3 Moreover, since the digital is not just another, more current medium, it has challenged traditional concepts of mediality and has made the idea of medium speci‹city, taken to be central to classical ‹lm theory, appear as a high-modernist preoccupation.4 As I hope to show, Kracauer’s essay, much as it responds to a particular stage of media culture, points up issues of technological image production and usage, proliferation and storage that persist , in different forms and in‹nitely vaster dimensions, in the ostensibly postphotographic age; it likewise complicates key concepts of this debate— such as indexicality—by unfolding them as historically contingent and mutable . Finally, with a view to ‹lm theory and, not least, Kracauer’s own Theory of Film (1960), the photography essay projects a ‹lm aesthetics that compels us to rethink the question of cinematic realism. Like Benjamin’s artwork essay, which it pre‹gures in important ways, Kracauer’s photography essay is organized in discrete sections that frame the object of investigation in the manner of different camera positions or separate takes. The protagonists of the resulting theory-‹lm, as it were, are two photographs that the writer introduces by way of juxtaposition: the contemporary image of a ‹lm star (caption: “our demonic diva”) on the cover of an illustrated journal and the portrait, over six decades old, of an unspeci‹ed grandmother, possibly Kracauer’s own, cast in the private setting of family viewing. Both images show women twenty-four years old; both images become the respective focus of later sections; and both metamorphose in the course of the essay—until they are united, in the eighth and last section, in the surreal panorama of modernity’s “general inventory ” or “main archive” (Hauptarchiv). The image of the ‹lm star, posing in front of the Hotel Excelsior on the Lido, embodies the present moment (“time: the present”)—not just a fashionable cosmopolitan modernity, but also a culture of presence, performance , perfection: “The bangs, the seductive tilt of the head, and the twelve eyelashes right and left—all these details, diligently enumerated by the camera, are in their proper place, a ›awless appearance” (MO, 47). Kracauer emphasizes the photograph’s double status as a material object that can be perceived in its sensory texture and a symbolic representation whose referent is elsewhere. Looking...

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