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The Exile of Modernity Kracauer’s Figurations of the Stranger Inka Mülder-Bach In May 1942, one year after arriving in New York, Siegfried Kracauer published his ‹rst essay on ‹lm for an American audience under the title “Why France Liked Our Films.” Finally having reached a more or less safe haven, Kracauer recalled the American ‹lms he had watched in France between 1933 and 1941 and answered the question posed in the title with two observations . On the one hand, while French movies notoriously focused on dialogue to the detriment of action, he noted that American ‹lms, keenly aware of the visual essence of the medium, zoomed in on all those material details of the visible world that Kracauer called “camera reality”: moving vehicles, passersby, staircases, streets, as well as the speed, ephemerality, and contingency of traf‹c ›ows. On the other hand, American movies fascinated the French public because of the way they depicted different milieus, characters, plots, and, not least of all, by their satirical streak. In Kracauer’s opinion, foreign viewers, at least those in France, perceived these moments as realistic representations of the American way of life. But would the impressions gathered in Europe by watching American ‹lms prove tenable in the United States? This question stands at the center of Kracauer’s essay, and his answer is so peculiar that it merits extended quotation: There is only one short moment in which the European observer can judge the validity of the images of American life he had received in European theatres: the moment of his arrival in this country. As a newcomer , he is still entirely connected with the Old World and thus can compare his fresh impressions on American soil with the pictures in his mind. These ‹rst impressions are rather super‹cial; but unfortunately, the more he succeeds in deepening them, the more is he unable to ver276 ify those brought over from Europe. It is not so much that they become transformed into pale reminiscences as for quite another reason: the newcomer establishes himself in America, and soon his contacts with the customs of this country are too intimate to permit dispassioned re›ections about American life. The whole perspective changes. He is involved in that life, and his reactions are no longer those of a spectator but of a participant. Their views can have no common denominator. Hence, a paradox arises: as soon as the former European acquires an opinion of American reality, he loses the possibility of using it to con‹rm or reject his old impressions. Probably many of them cannot be maintained here; but that says nothing against their validity in Europe. To come back to that decisive moment—the marvelous ‹rst meeting with life in America. As we entered New York harbor, the strange feeling of having already seen all this began to grow upon me. Each new sight was an act of recognition. We passed such old acquaintances as the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island and the skyline, which, however, in the vast sky looked smaller than I had imagined it from the pictures. Then the detective-inspectors came aboard, shouting “Take it easy!” and “Go ahead!”, and afterwards the dock swarmed with reporters. To the passionate movie-goer it was like a dream: either he had been suddenly transplanted onto the screen or the screen itself had come into three-dimensional existence. Nor did the dream cease in New York, where other familiar types began to emerge from the crowd: the ice-cream man, the shoe-shine boy, the Salvation Army. All the things that had ‹lled in the background of hundreds of American ‹lms proved to be true to life. The steps before the brown-stone houses were as real as the furnished rooms, the miraculous drug stores and the splendid lobbies of the apartment houses one had suspected in Europe as mere studio settings. This was the start—a convincing proof of the realistic power with which Hollywood pictures transmit everyday American life to people abroad. Then followed the slow process of personal adjustment, and with it that change of perspective mentioned above. In due course, things came out which obviously had been overlooked in these ‹lms. In New York, for instance, ‹lms neither take notice of Broadway in the morning, nor do they picture the hundreds of cross-town streets that end in the empty sky. So far as I remember, there have been no shots either that bring out...

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