Provisional Insight Colloquium: Graeme Gilloch
18th July 2008
Ad Lib: Reflections on Siegfried Kracauer and the Image of Improvisation
Graeme Gilloch
This paper seeks to explore one of Siegfried Kracauer’s most suggestive but least developed concepts: ‘improvisation’. Improvisation stands in opposition to the ornamental and serves as a key motif in Kracauer’s vision of modern metropolitan experience and his understanding of the potential of the cinematic medium. In his presentation of diverse practices and images of improvisation – bodily, performative, material, textual – Kracauer points to the critical and comic qualities of the felicitously unforeseen. The paper concludes by arguing for the utopian promise of acting ‘according to pleasure’.
Graeme Gilloch is a Reader in the Department of Sociology at Lancaster University. He has published two monographs on the writings of Walter Benjamin (both with Polity Press, Cambridge: Myth and Metropolis: Walter Benjamin and the City [1996] and Critical Constellations: Walter Benjamin [2002]). In addition, he has published numerous essays exploring Benjamin’s work in relation to more contemporary theorists (especially Jean Baudrillard), writers (Paul Auster, W.G. Sebald, Orhan Pamuk) and artists (Sophje Calle, Janet Cardiff). A former Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow at Frankfurt University, he is currently researching and writing an intellectual biography of Siegfried Kracauer.