Siegfried Kracauer

Siegfried Kracauer (1889-1966) was one of the most important historians and theorists of cinema. He was born in Frankfurt, where he worked as a writer and journalist from 1920 to 1933, after earning his doctorate in philosophy from the University of Berlin. With the rise of Hitler to power, he left Germany and emigrated to the United States in 1941. After working for a few years at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, he published a fascinating study in 1947 titled "From Caligari to Hitler," in which he examines the socio-economic conditions and psychological atmosphere that led to Hitler's rise, as reflected in the German cinema of the interwar period. In 1960, while working as a member of the Department of Applied Social Research at Columbia University, he published his second major work, "Theory of Film," a comprehensive work of film theory, according to which the mission of cinema is the "redemption of physical reality."