ABSTRACT
In the post-war period, European film theory was dominated by approaches to film that incorporated post-catastrophic narrative forms and visual styles, especially those of Italian neorealism. Yet this period also saw a return of vitalist motifs in film theory. Even more so than in pre-war film theory, the vitality of the moving image was related to the question of the human being and its relationship to other forms of life, as well as questions of humanism. This novel combination of interest in life, realism, and modes of narration is especially evident in the work of André Bazin, but also seems to set Siegfried Kracauer’s belated Theory of Film (1960) apart from his pre-WWII writings. The resurgence of vitalist motifs in post-war film theory should surprise us, for classical accounts of vitalism see this as a movement that achieved its apotheosis when it merged with Nazi ideology in the Third Reich, where holism and the idea of the state as an organism served to justify an aggressive foreign policy and racial ideologies; it is not diffficult to detect, for example, the chilling resonance between this political interest in holism and Uexküll’s idea of the Umwelt of the state. 1 In the interwar period and during WWII, in other words, a politicized notion of life encouraged value distinctions between good and bad forms of life, and fueled the idea of ‘cleansing’ the state organism, a goal that was then used to justify radical measures against ‘harmful elements’ such as Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, and handicapped people. From this perspective, the dangers of vitalism were thoroughly exposed by Nazism, and the Allies’ triumph over Nazism was also understood to be a triumph over vitalist thought.
