Recently, the question of how and even whether to situate works of art within history has given rise to intense methodological disputes across the humanities. Scholars have challenged the privileging of cultural context above other concerns, from aesthetics and form to transtemporal resonance and present-day relevance. In Rita Felski’s gloss, “Though we cannot as yet speak of a posthistoricist school, a multitude of minor mutinies and small-scale revolts are under way.” Offering an ironic prehistory of contemporary posthistoricism, this lecture will explore the relation between cinema and the “crisis of historicism” widely diagnosed by German philosophers in the interwar period. I will argue that films of the Weimar Republic lent vivid expression to the crisis of historical thinking, revealing the capacity of the medium to engage with fundamental questions of the philosophy of history. Drawing sustained attention to the philosophical critiques of historicism that accompanied the first decades of moving-image culture, I will propose a more reflexive mode of historiography—one that considers how film itself reflects on questions of historicism—as well as an approach to studying cinema in conjunction with enduring historical-philosophical concerns. My guide will be Siegfried Kracauer, who integrated the critique of historicism into a theory of film and media in his writings of the Weimar period and beyond.

The lecture will be videostreamed only (Zoom), please email fairfax@tfm.uni-frankfurt.de for the invitation link.