The Spaces of Art

Abstract

The Spaces of Art Marcia Landy (bio) THE POLITICS AND POETICS OF CINEMATIC REALISM BY HERMANN KAPPELHOFF Columbia University Press, 2015 Among his prolific writings on film, Hermann Kappelhoff has published monographs on the director G. W. Pabst and the New Objectivity; on melodrama, cinema, and sentiment; on realism; and on Hollywood genres between the wars. In The Politics and poetics of Cinematic Realism, Kappelhoff has undertaken an ambitious examination of the aesthetics of prevailing cinematic forms drawn from European and Hollywood cinema. His attention to the expressive poetics of cinematic form invokes the philosophic thinking of Jacques Rancière and Gilles Deleuze, Stanley Cavell and Richard Rorty to provide a framework for his rethinking of cinema history, film form and theory, performance, and reception for the creation of a shared cinematic sensibility. Kappelhoff's book is organized by decades, by selected exemplary films, and by film and theoretical cultural writings to account for changing formal and historical developments for rethinking the medium. Kappelhoff's objective is "to make clear what distinguishes the question of the relationship between poetics and politics in the cinema from a return to the cinema as a medium that produces ideology" (13). Chapter 1, "Poetics and Politics," defines the key words under scrutiny. Kappelhoff largely derives his conception of "aesthetics" from Rancière to designate "the forms of thinking or the forms of art no longer in dependency on a previously established reality (of human nature)." An aesthetic regime for Rancière "designates a connection between an arrangement of art and an idea of thinking itself" (7). [End Page 213] Kappelhoff's conception of politics entails "changing the 'dispositifs of power' as a permanent refiguration of the community in the mode of dissensus" (21). The experience of dissensus as "breaking old configurations" (22) is at the center of Kappelhoff's utopian quest to distinguish a politics of cinema through poetics, occupying a familiar terrain that links his work to long-standing political considerations of "poetic cinema as" a periodic form for addressing dissatisfactions with reigning patterns. My question thus is, How effective is Kappelhoff's argument for dissensus as political in relation to contemporary cinema? The author's conception of "cinematic realism" is reliant on "images that are indeed presented as perceptions of the world corresponding to what we are used to, but that propose arrangements of bodies and spaces that are radically separate from the world of our everyday experience. In the history of cinema, it is 'realism' that stands for this paradox" (24). Hence, the reader will be given random "test cases" that will represent a historical form of appearance, the "(incalculable because historical) effect of a certain historical shape of the mutual relationship between poetics/art and politics … to create a "new landscape of the visible" (23). From this landscape the reader should gain a sense of the spaces of the history of cinema as an art, if not of history itself, as inherent to perception and affect. Kappelhoff insists ingeniously that "the films discussed are chosen quite at random, and their representative value could be contested" (25). In chapter 2, "Before the War," Kappelhoff's identification of these "spaces of cinema history" begins with Sergei Eisenstein (1898–1948). In Eisenstein's films (and writings), the cinematic is determined not by a priori space as given but through movement, montage, and rearrangement, thus privileging the technical. Eisenstein "proposes a type of movement-image as a kind of perceiving and sensing to be … [that] understands the cinematic image as a temporal structure that becomes spatial by becoming a specific world of perception within the living, present seeing and hearing of the spectator" (36). Kappelhoff connects the characteristics of Eisenstein's montage to the films of Pabst and Die neue Sachlichkeit (The New Objectivity) through Alfred Döblin's, Hebert Ihering's, and Béla Balázs's emphasis on the relationship between the visible man and the cinematic image "that could manage to reduce the world of art to the photographable" (48). [End Page 214] The connection between viewer and social reality in early modernity as described by the German theater critic Herbert Ihering is a "barbaric primitive period of a coming civilization...