4 * Film Theory

Abstract

Four particularly important books of film theory were published in 2012, two by established scholars in film—Miriam Bratu Hansen and Thomas Elsaesser—along with two timely collections of essays by twentieth-century theorists, Siegfried Kracauer and Georg Lukács, with the latter collection featuring an excellent commentary by Ian Aitken. The chapter is divided into four sections: 1. Cinema and Experience; 2. Siegfried Kracauer’s American Writings; 3. Lukácsian Film Theory; 4. The Persistence of Hollywood. The late Miriam Bratu Hansen’s Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno (U Cal P [2012]) is the culmination of a career’s work, much of which was focused on the writings of Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer and, to a slightly lesser extent, Theodor Adorno on film and media. Hansen’s career began with her groundbreaking long essay, published in New German Critique in 1987 (‘Benjamin, Cinema and Experience: “The Blue...