Word: kracauer
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...Kracauer divides German film history into three main periods. The first (1918-24) was a period of fierce mental ferment; during those years, the German film attained its highest artistic maturity (Variety, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari), and the screen was a battleground for most of the conflicting anxieties and desires of the German mind...
...second period (1924-29), thanks to the Dawes plan, was one of relative stabilization. But by the evidence of the films, stabilization meant an avoidance of intellectual and spiritual issues. Movies about adolescence were significantly popular (Children of No Importance); the Germans looked back nostalgically, Dr. Kracauer says, to an era when the immaturity they had never outgrown was charming and legitimate...
...postwar years were the Golden Age of German films, and it is of the wild, queer, charming, sometimes great, sometimes outrageously arty films of those years that Dr. Kracauer writes most entertainingly...
...cooked up a story "frame" (i.e., he had the main story told by an asylum inmate) which made the heroes (and the authors) seem mad. Authority emerged as a benign force, and the whole point of the original story was sidetracked. The popular device of the "framing story," Dr. Kracauer explains, shows the German mind introversively withdrawing into a shell...
Caligari was followed by many imitations. The picture's "basic theme-the soul faced with the seemingly unavoidable alternative of tyranny or chaos-exerted extraordinary fascination." A long procession of tyrants crossed the screen; Dr. Kracauer wonders whether their cruelties and excesses were expressions of a premonitory fear of what lay in the depths of the German soul...