Siegfried Kracauer- Cinema, it's Basic Properties, Tendencies, and the Issue of Art

The German-born journalist, writer, sociologist and cultural critic Siegfried Kracauer is most renowned today for Theory of Film, his dissertation on the aesthetics of the cinema. Among his many elaborate chapters on the subject is his classification of its properties, tendencies and the ever longing debate about whether cinema could be considered "art" or not. 

Kracauer classified the properties of the motion picture into two- basic and technical.

Basic Properties

The basic property of film is very much the same as that of photography in that both the media attempt to record and reproduce physical reality, the only difference being that the former records the world as it evolves in time whereas the latter is frozen in time. It is this ability of the motion picture to capture movement that makes it suitable for recording events and preserving them. But it cannot be counted as making use of the creative potential of the medium.

Technical properties

Of all technical properties that can be attributed to the medium, Kracauer considers editing to be the most significant (It was, undoubtedly, one of the earliest properties that was discovered by filmmakers). Editing helps the filmmaker, through the arrangement of various shots, to communicate an idea. This is where cinema and photography diverge- although photo montage can come close, it does not offer such potential.

Moving from the properties of cinema, Kracauer lists some of the main tendencies of the medium and moves on to list two tendencies, realistic and formative.

Realistic tendency

When the motion picture camera was first invented, the earliest pioneers were content to use a stationary camera and record the movement that was presented before it (Kracauer called such movement external movement). It paid off initially, since audiences were enthralled by the very act of seeing photographed movement. Over time, the novelty wore off and filmmakers were constantly in search of newer ways of expressing themselves.

In this search for newer possibilities of the medium ,filmmakers were quick to realise the potential hidden in subjective movement like a panning, tilting or travelling camera to reveal objects that would otherwise have been left unnoticed. Equally significant was the ability to communicate ideas through by arranging different strips of film in the appropriate manner.

When it comes to presenting an incident on film, staging becomes an important factor. In cinematic staging, it is very often not only the action that demands staging; the surroundings in which the action is staged also deserves attention. Owing to the nature of the medium, it is obligatory that the surroundings in which a scene is staged needs to be as faithful a reproduction as possible as the real world so that the viewer is deceived into believing that the world presented on celluloid is a real one.

Staging an event for the camera can sometimes make an event look more convincing than it would have been were it shot on real locations. An example for this would be Chaplin’s The Gold Rush. Barring the first scene, the rest of the film was shot entirely in a studio, and it looks quite convincing. Chaplin could never have made the film the way he wanted to if he had shot it entirely on location in the stormy mountains of Alaska. But there are situations where the opposite is also true. A famous example for this would be Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North, which could never have been shot in a studio.

Formative Tendency

Right from the inception of motion pictures, filmmakers have constantly strived to go beyond merely recording and reproducing physical reality. George Melies can be considered to be the first person in the history of the medium to have explored this tendency of the medium, wherein a non-realistic world is created entirely using photographic means. Since then, many filmmakers have constantly tried to create films that are anything but realistic. The experimental or avant-garde film is one such genre which explores such possibilities of the medium.

As many films have demonstrated over the past century, it is possible to bring both the tendencies together in one film. As a result, you have realistic films that include dream sequences and those where the hero suddenly bursts into a song. Not that they always make an effective combination- there are several examples of films where the two tendencies have been used in woefully mismatched ways –but they can be brought together in several ways that are aesthetically valid.

When is cinema “cinematic”?

Kracauer believes that a film can claim aesthetic legibility if they build from their basic properties, that of recording and revealing physical reality. But there have been reactions against this property, chiefly from the German Expressionist cinema, which revelled in highly stylized, almost dreamlike imagery. But over a period of time, such films have come to be considered less “cinematic” than the ones that draw on physical reality, the reason being that films of the latter type provide a certain degree of insight and enjoyment that the former cannot. Yet there have been films produced time and again that do away with realism and still become popular among the audience.

It is exactly for these reasons that it is good not to be single-minded about the potential of the film medium. In short, there is no standard definition for what can be considered “cinematic”. The essence of cinema lies in how efficiently a filmmaker uses his creative faculties to make the best use of the medium’s potential.

The issue of art

The very concept of cinema as an art form misleads many people into placing it on a par with the traditional art forms. This is untrue since most art forms are free from reality whereas the very nature of film is its function of recording and revealing physical reality. This very function of the medium provides the raw material out of which the filmmaker can make his composition. While it is true that cinema can draw a lot from the other arts like painting, music, literature and theatre, merely transferring them to the camera is a neglect of the medium’s intrinsic potential. If that were so, the world would never have seen films like Battleship Potemkin and Nanook of the North, which would not have existed if there never was a movie camera.