THE SETTING EYES ON THE GORGON: SIEGFRIED KRACAUER AND FILM THEORY AFTER HOLOCAUST (Zobaczyc Gorgone. Siegfried Kracauer i teoria filmu po Zagladzie)

The significance Kracauer assigned to the camera's interest in the meaningless and the marginal in his 'Theory of Film' (1960) goes hand in hand with the way he situates pertinent-feeling fragments of his own discourse on the margins of the main flow of the argument. They are the most troublesome fragments if read from the perspective of a unifying, realistic interpretation of 'Theory of Film'. In many cases, these offhand digressions have turned out to be the pieces of a primary theoretical concept from the 1940-1941 - as revealed by Kracauer's notebooks now known to us. Kracauer notes here the relationship between the extermination as the utter disappearance of people and the erasure of their deaths from the composition of an image - and claims this connection to be central to the Holocaust. When the film image reaches a place where all representation must be annihilated, it becomes the last refuge of violated human dignity. Some of this arguments derivate from the discussion on the allegory of the skull from Walter Benjamin's 'Ursprung des Trauerspiel'. This view can, of course, in no way be reconciled with Theodor Adorno's famous, iconoclastic stance. In the light of Kracauer's discussion with Adorno the thesis of impossibility of representation of the Shoah should be read in new perspective.