SIEGFRIED KRACAUER AND THE DETECTIVE MOVIES (1923-1947):
LANGUAGE, STYLE AND SOCIAL EXPRESSIVENESS
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.7443/problemata.v17i3.80279Keywords:
Siegfried Kracauer, History of Cinema, Detective movies, Criticism and HistoriographyAbstract
In Siegfried Kracauer’s intellectual trajectory, his engagement with the detective story as a literary genre occupies a pivotal place in the formation of his phenomenological and materialist interpretation of mass society and its culture. Against this backdrop, this article argues that, beyond the literary sphere, Kracauer elaborated a theory of the detective film across twelve reviews published in the Frankfurter Zeitung between 1923 and 1930, developing this account through a sustained engagement with the central categories, theoretical premises, and critical perspectives that informed his thought. In his earliest reviews of detective films (1923–1924), this dialogue takes shape through his recognition of the detective film both as a distinct cinematic genre and as a surface phenomenon of bourgeois culture. In the subsequent reviews (1926–1928), detective films are examined in relation to the crisis and transformation of narrative structure and characterization, while the later writings (1929–1930) extend this inquiry to questions concerning the formal disintegration of silent cinema and the consolidation of sound film, situating these technological and aesthetic transformations within the development of the genre. Ultimately, From Caligari to Hitler (1947) reveals the culmination of this trajectory, Kracauer constructs a fragmentary history of the detective film through an immanent analysis of its social and aesthetic forms, one fundamentally informed by his critique of liberalism and Nazi fascism.
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