Siegfried Kracauer’s Secret Business

This summer, Haidee Wasson presented « Siegfried Kracauer’s Secret Business: A German Émigré and American Institutions of Film Art (1939 –1945) » at the international conference Geographies of film Theory held at the University of London.

For more informations about the conference, follow this link.

You can download her contribution and comment it.

"This is a paper that in its most general terms focuses more on the “geography” rather thanthe “theory” of film theory. It asks: what are the material and institutional conditions for the generation, circulation and writing of film theory. It focuses on one émigré film
scholar, and situates him in relation to the institutional formations that enabled, shaped
and were also transformed by his work. In this sense, this paper maps a complicated
geography, one that spans places (Germany to America) and spaces (museums, libraries
and governments at war), linking individuals like Kracauer to particular kind of traffic in
film knowledge, a traffic that characterizes a certain period in time and connects some
likely and unlikely people as well as ideas." H. Wasson.