According to the German-trained theorist Siegfried Kracauer, the cinema is characterized by a number of natural affinities. Explain Kracauer’s theory of realism and what these natural affinities are
What will be an ideal response?
Answer: The ideal answer should include:
1. Realist theorists like Cesare Zavattini and Siegfried Kracauer believed that cinema is essentially an extension of photography and shares with it a pronounced affinity for recording the
visible world around us.
2. According to Kracauer, the cinema is characterized by a number of natural affinities. First of all, it tends to favor “unstaged reality”—that is, the most appropriate subject matter gives the illusion of having been found rather than arranged.
3. Second, film tends to stress the random, the fortuitous. Kracauer was fond of the phrase “nature caught in the act,” meaning that film is best suited to recording events and objects that might be overlooked in life. The realistic cinema is a cinema of “found moments”
and poignant revelations of humanity.
4. A third affinity that Kracauer noted was indeterminacy. The best movies suggest endlessness. They imply a slice of life, a fragment of a larger reality rather than a self-contained whole. By refusing to tie up all the loose ends at the conclusion of the movie, the filmmaker can suggest the limitlessness of reality.
5. Therefore, Kracauer also attacked plot as a natural enemy of realism.
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