ABSTRACT
To this day the distinction between Rudolf Arnheim the formalist and Siegfried Kracauer the realist is fundamental to classical film theory. Film cannot become an art, argues Arnheim in his canonical Film als Kunst (1932), if it only records reality and, in that way, simply duplicates the world. Precisely the technical limitations that render it an imperfect means of reproduction grant it the formative capacity to become an art.1 Kracauer, as we know well, begged to differ. For the author of the equally canonical Theory of Film (1960), the medium shares with photography the propensity for capturing unaltered reality. This is its chief characteristic; for this reason, realism constitutes for Kracauer the very essence of film, indeed its principal criterion of aesthetic value.2 The clear-cut opposition between Arnheim’s formalism and Kracauer’s realism seems hardly controversial and virtually unassailable. University course offerings on classical film theory, relying on the disposition of Dudley Andrew’s still widely used monograph, The Major Film Theories (1978), employ this dramatic disparity between
Arnheim’s constructivism and Kracauer’s non-interventionism as an organizing principle.3 And yet there are curious and intriguing affinities between these two seminal thinkers, which complicate such a construction and, at least to a degree, compel us to reconsider our understanding of Arnheim’s work on film.
