Aesthetic of Modernist Cinema

Standing Out in a Crowd: The Aesthetic of Modernist Cinema

2

Among the large objects, such as vast plains or

panoramas of any kind, one deserves special

attention: the masses. No doubt imperial Rome

already teemed with them. But masses of people in

the modern sense entered the historical scene only in

the wake of the industrial revolution. Then they

became a social force of first magnitude. Warring

nations resorted to levies on an unheard-of scale and

identifiable groups yielded to the anonymous multitude

which filled the big cities in the form of amorphous

crowds. Walter Benjamin observes that in the period

marked by the rise of photography the daily sight of

moving crowds was still a spectacle to which eyes and

nerves had to get adjusted…. As might be expected,

the traditional arts proved unable to encompass and

render it. Where they failed, photography easily

succeeded; it was technically equipped to portray

crowds as the accidental agglomerations they are. Yet

only film, the fulfillment of photography in a sense,

was equal to the task of capturing them in motion. In

this case the instrument of reproduction came into

being almost simultaneously with one of its main

subjects. Hence the attraction which masses exerted

on still and motion picture cameras from the outset.

(Siegfried Kracauer 298)

The Establishment of Physical Existence

Siegfried Kracauer’s Theory of Film elucidates the correlation

between the cinematic medium and masses, or more acutely the

aesthetic of the masses. As he observes, film has depicted mass crowds

since its birth; Auguste and Louis Lumiere’s first screened project after

inventing the cinematograph recorded a crowd of workers leaving a

factory. The ideological and poli...

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...Accessed November 14, 2005.

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Kracauer, Siegfried. The Establishment of Physical Existence. Film

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1995.

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