Provisional Insight Colloquium: Helen Grace
19th July 2008
Indissoluble Girl Clusters: Kracauer in China
At the beginning of ‘The Mass Ornament’, Kracauer makes an audacious statement which sets the tone not only for this essay but in many ways for his entire oeuvre: ‘The position that an epoch occupies in the historical process can be determined more strikingly from an analysis of its inconspicuous surface-level expressions than from that epoch’s judgments about itself’. This claim for the high significance of ephemeral aspects of culture is perhaps the reason for the enduring attraction of Kracauer’s work and in this paper I want to consider a recent instance which suggests the fresh relevance of this work. In the recruitment by the Beijing Olympics Organizing Committee of young women to act as official guides, a set of very precise physical characteristics detailed the principle qualifications which women were required to have – from height, to facial symmetry and bodily proportion. In this new case of the formation of ‘indissoluble girl clusters whose movements are demonstrations of mathematics’, a new development is discernible. If in Kracauer’s original example, the ‘mass ornament’ is considered an end in itself, the production of regularity of appearance, in the case I am discussing, overturns the original distinction which Kracauer makes between ‘living star formations’, evacuated of meaning, on the one hand and on the other, military exercises designed to arouse patriotic feelings, suggesting new meanings and the possibility of a new ‘mass ornament’ form, in the service of a new ‘fairy tale’.
This paper will also reflect on the use of Kracauer’s thought in the development of film theory in China precisely as an alternative to the sole use of cinema as a propaganda tool and in general, some discussion of the complexities of propaganda will be considered.