Siegfried Kracauer Quotes

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The flood of photos sweeps away the dams of memory. Never before has a period known so little about itself. In the hands of the ruling society, the invention of illustrated magazines is one of the most powerful means of organizing a strike against understanding... The 'image-idea' drives away the idea.

Siegfried Kracauer

A shudder runs through the viewer of old photographs. For they make visible not the knowledge of the original but the spatial configuration of a moment; what appears in the photograph is not the person but the sum of what can be subtracted from him or her.

Siegfried Kracauer

The world has become a photographable present, and the photographed present has been entirely eternalized. Seemingly ripped from the clutch of death, in reality it has succumbed to it.

Siegfried Kracauer

Siegfried Kracauer

Siegfried Kracauer

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Born: February 8, 1889

Died: November 26, 1966 (aged 77)

Bio: Siegfried Kracauer was a German writer, journalist, sociologist, cultural critic, and film theorist. He has sometimes been associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory.

Known for:

Theory of film (1960)
From Caligari to Hitler (1947)
The mass ornament
History, the last things before the last

Siegfried Kracauer on Wikipedia

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