The locus of psychoanalysis in Kracauer’s writings about film: mass and audience

Abstract

This article aims to furnish critical reflections concerning the relations between the analytical production of Siegfried Kracauer and the psychoanalytical legacy, particularly in what says respect to the ways in which he employs it in his writings about film in order to deal with the concepts of “mass” and “audience”. The inherent ideology of such process, as developed by Kracauer, is discussed, as well as the appropriation of psychoanalytical referencies as a not always explicit but recurrent theoretical frame in the analysis of the social role of the “mass” in Metropolis (Fritz Lang, Germany, 1927). Introduced by an inquiry about the context in which Kracauer’s Theory of Film (1960) was critically evaluated at its releasing time, the final part of the text examines the effects of the peculiar way in which psichanalysis is employed by the author in the chapter about audience.