The strangest of station names: changing trains with Kracauer and Benjamin

New Formations - ISSN 0950-2378
Volume 2007 Number 61

The strangest of station names: changing trains with Kracauer and Benjamin
Barry Langford pages -

Abstract

Langford explores Kracauer and Benjamin’s mutual interest in urban landscape in film, and capitalist modernity’s obscuring of historical reality. He examines the metaphor of the railway as suggestive of Kracauer’s ambivalence toward film and modernity, via Walter Ruttman and Claude Lanzmann’s documentaries. Examining ‘Theory of Film’ (1960), Langford suggests it avoids ‘naive realism’ in favour of a tragic poetics of the real, indicated by the analysis of film’s concealed barbaric gaze.

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To cite this article
Barry Langford (2007) The strangest of station names: changing trains with Kracauer and Benjamin, New Formations, 2007(61), -

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