Of Film: The Redemption Of Physical Reality By Siegfried Kracauer

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The realism of cinema is the artistic movement to recreate and replicate life as accurately and objectively as possible on screen. This statement is clearly defined in the chapter of Basic Concepts in Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality by Siegfried Kracauer. The author explains that film is essentially a more elaborate form of photography, where as a whole, they record and reveal physical reality through the medium of photographic technology. Kracauer deemed realism to be a very important factor in film, more so in the content than the way it is conceived. He rejected the introduction of formative tendencies in filmmaking, which in a way imposed meaning on the images. He believed that films should just be about picturing movement …show more content…

We see street scenes of everyday life, reproductions of theatrical scenes and abstracted realities being produced in films over the years. It is rather inaccurate of Kracauer to determine that film should only resemble the limitless occurrences of life itself. Film was and is not only “a sense of observation”, but also a combination of that as well as a whole other universe.

In this paper, we present an analytical framework of Kracauer and his unique film theory, and go into how cinema of the past and present responds to it. We seek to find out what is it about the formative tendency that Kracauer so strongly rejects in his definition of film. And what is it about the craftiness of fantasy and contrived plots that Kracauer strongly opposes? Will such theory of his survive in the world of cinema?

Basic and technical properties
Film, as mentioned by Kracauer, is an extension of photography itself. Thus, the basic properties would include the properties of photography. Its main purpose is to record physical reality as it happens. The photographed world will be the physical world as we see, know and recognise. But this world is not to be confused with the staged world. Despite film being a reproductive medium, such that our physical world and the staged world are being recorded and produced again and again, the staged world is not like the physical world. This is in the sense that the physical world would continue on with life while the staged world would crumble were it to relate to real-life

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