Abstract

According to Siegfried Kracauer, photography and cinema operate impersonally to capture reality and break the spell that has configured its disposition. The critical potential of the camera has its natural element in the city and can be summarized in the recording of a world in which things are socially condemned to disappear. If in Kracauer's first "Theory of the Film" this critical task takes on a political significance, in the 1960 version the insistence on the potential of material and exploratory analysis of the film medium attenuates the reference to the philosophy of alienation. Once promoted to a tool for knowledge, the film engages in a dialogue with the anthropological reflection on the role of memory in the relationship between human beings and nature.