부산대학교 도서관

This essay aims to expose the meaning of modernity in Siegfried Kracauer’s writings on photography and film with its relation to his concept of ‘ornament’. In the cultural and theoretical context of Kracauer’s era, the culture of ‘ornament’ was understood in terms of opposing to the reason and mechanic rationality so criticized by modernists. However, the ornaments have, for Kracauer, meanings as mirrors of contemporary cultures which reflect the symptom of modern society. Through early 20th century, European society had experienced radical capitalization resulted from the expansion of Americanized consumer culture. The modern labor relation characterized by the conveyer belt, Taylorism, and bureaucracy had exacerbated human alienations by substituting human labor with mechanical processes. The struggle between reason and nature, paralleled to the whole human history, seemed to raise the former’s hand, and as a result, human communities had been destructed in the atomization of individuals caused by people’s blind faith in the rationality and abstractness. In this dehumanized social situations, escaping to anonymity in mass and living as ornaments was, as Kracauer’s discussion, a possible option that people could choose as their life style. Kracauer evaluates ornaments as the archive of history. In his writings, ‘photographic images’ are compared to ‘memory images’ with regards to former’s capacity to inscribe every detail of scenes, which the latter lacks due to its subjective focus. Ornamental details in photographic images are not mediated by the network of human understanding, thus they can function as historical records which reveal concealed meanings of an era after this time has gone. Kracauer’s mention on ornaments as ‘the last memory images’ implies this feature of photographic images which has changed humans’ mechanism of memorization. The ornament is also a component of filmic images. For Kracauer, films have meanings not only as media which reflect social realities, but as the places to which people’s collective desires are projected. In this interaction between films and realities, ornaments are nothing but distorted surface images which fill peripheries of screen, but they have significance as reflections of individuals’ mentality, desire, memory, and people’s collective unconsciousness. Despite these peripheral positions in narratives and mise-en-scene, ornamental images in film provide physical realities and historical records from which viewers can interpret symptoms of social changes. In this sense, the concept of ornament in Kracauer’s works can be understood as histories sinking into oblivion but waiting to be uncovered and restored.