Word: kracauer
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...high end, Mikhail Baryshnikov hailed him as the dancer of the century, and Jerome Robbins created a ballet in tribute to Astaire's "I'm Old Fashioned" dance with Rita Hayworth. Starchy Teutonic theorist Siegfried Kracauer praised him for injecting realism in Hollywood films by "dancing over table tops and down garden paths into the real world." Kracauer was totally wrong - Astaire didn't bring realism but rather a nonchalant nobility to movies - but it's touching that the nutty professor bent his theory to accommodate a tap dancer he loved...
...pick the best Astaire-Rogers number? Robbins and Brooks had their favorites; Kracauer's reference is to "The Yam" from "Carefree," which is also the choice of Entertainment Weekly's Ty Burr. I love "Pick Yourself Up," another you-hate-me-now-but-when-we-dance-you'll-like me number, from "Swing Time." And I can't imagine a more beautiful expression of reluctant rapture than Ginger's in the "Cheek to Cheek" dance from "Top Hat." And not just the song (Berlin's finest) or the dance (one of Astaire's most brilliant). I'm thinking...
...pantheon of great directors, Fritz Lang is a bit of an anomaly. Unlike his contemporary Alfred Hitchcock, who was canonized early on and remains a universally acknowledged god of cinema, Lang’s road to directorial fame was an oblique one. Although denounced by Siegfried Kracauer as a fascist in the forties, and then heralded by the French Cahiers du Cinema as an amateur in the sixties, his work has received a surprising dearth of critical attention. It has only been in the last few years that critics have begun to exhume many of his films and give...
...aesthetics too ashamed to show its face in discussions of the novel has long held sway in theories of the cinema. Writers like Kracauer and Bazin have elaborated value systems whose central equation comes whole from the nineteenth-century bourgeois novel tradition. Godard fights alone the arts' last battle against realistic representation...
...Kracauer's is a big, impressive, careful piece of work. The book will appeal most to those who remember such German films as The Last Laugh, Variety, The Blue Angel, The Beggars' Opera-some of the most glamorous and exciting movies of their time. But Dr. Kracauer's prose is pretty heavy; and his argument, though persuasive, is not always proved with scientific finality. Like some other psyche-interpreters-professional and amateur-he tends to overinterpret. It is interesting to speculate on what the same sort of intense look at Hollywood films would tell the doctor about...