Hans Richter and the “Struggle for the Film History”

Abstract

Referencing avant-garde artist and film-maker Hans Richter’s materialist film history book The Struggle for the Film, this chapter looks at Richter’s “struggle for the film history” and his own place in it. Richter’s concern with history was a constant factor in his long career that spanned several art movements and two continents. Richter’s notion of history and his doing film (and art) history in writing, teaching, and film-making provide insights into the politics and material conditions of film history in the wider context of exile and the preservation of endangered cultural heritage and in relation to the historiographies and philosophies of history of his compatriots Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer, who shared the fate of eviction and exile.