‘Thoughts towards an Aesthetic of the Cinema’ (Lukács 1913)

This chapter is a close analysis of Lukács’ 1913 paper ‘Thoughts towards an Aesthetic of the Cinema’, in Which Lukács writes about the relation between film and the theatre. The paper forms part of the ‘Kino Debate’, then taking place in Germany, over the future potential of the cinema as a vehicle for liberation and of aesthetic value. The paper relates film to the body and intuition, in contrast to the theatre, which is regarded as a vehicle for the high intellect. In this paper, Lukacs introduces the notion of the ‘cinema of the fantastic’ and opposes this to the hegemony of logic within modernity. Key notions such as the ‘great moment’ and the ‘present moment’, and the banality of ‘ordinary life’, and the concept of Stimmung, are also considered.