Chapter 4: “Film as the Discoverer of the Marvels of Everyday Life”: Kracauer and the Promise of Realist Cinema

In the years following the publication of Siegfried Kracauer’s Theory of 1 Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality in 1960 , the book came under fire by a number of critics, whose reactions to Kracauer’s delineation of the promise of the medium were both patronising and acrimonious. As Miriam Hansen has argued in her introduction to Theory of Film, foremost among those analyses of the book which “assumed an unusually 2 condescending tone” were Pauline Kael’s hostile account of Kracauer’s “German pedantry” and Dudley Andrew’s dismissive references to the “utterly transparent” nature of the concerns addressed in Kra3 cauer’s “huge homogeneous block of realist theory” . Indeed, as revealed by Richard Corliss’s highly critical account of the book, it appears that Kracauer’s “irredeemable sin” lies in the perceived extent to which,