The Specificity of the Aesthetic (Lukács 1963)

Abstract

This chapter is a close analysis of the chapter entitled ‘Film’ in Lukács’s 1963 book, The Specificity of the Aesthetic. In this chapter, Lukács forwards a naturalist-impressionistic account of film that is at variance to much of his writing on literature. Lukács also relates film to the modern condition and discusses the nature of time in film. The chapter discusses some of Lukacs’s ley concepts, such as Geradesosein, Besonderheit, the photographic ‘deanthropomorphising’ basis of film, and the ‘field of objectivity’.