Nicholas Baer is Assistant Professor of German at the University of California, Berkeley, with affiliations in Film & Media, Critical Theory, and Jewish Studies. He is coeditor of The Promise of Cinema: German Film Theory, 1907–1933; Unwatchable; and Technics: Media in the Digital Age.

"This remarkable intellectual history excavates the scope and significance of the reaction against the entrenched ‘historicism’ that engaged German critics and filmmakers in the 1920s. . . . Baer’s signal achievement, however, is in the compelling case he makes that motion picture film was formally inextricable from philosophical thought about the mechanical device and its image that defined perception as well as delivered representations of the world. . . . A model for our time."

• ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction1. Historical Turns 2. Things as they could have happened: Siegfried Kracauer and the historical film 3. Relativist perspectivism: the cabinet of Dr. Caligari 4. Metaphysics of death: destiny 5. The nonsimultaneity of the simultaneous: rhythm 21 6. Natural history: the holy mountain Epilogue. The Weimar analogy: metropolis and the global present Notes Bibliography Index

Nicholas Baer is Assistant Professor of German at the University of California, Berkeley, with affiliations in Film & Media, Critical Theory, and Jewish Studies. He is coeditor of The Promise of Cinema: German Film Theory, 1907–1933; Unwatchable; and Technics: Media in the Digital Age.

"This remarkable intellectual history excavates the scope and significance of the reaction against the entrenched ‘historicism’ that engaged German critics and filmmakers in the 1920s. . . . Baer’s signal achievement, however, is in the compelling case he makes that motion picture film was formally inextricable from philosophical thought about the mechanical device and its image that defined perception as well as delivered representations of the world. . . . A model for our time."

• ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction1. Historical Turns 2. Things as they could have happened: Siegfried Kracauer and the historical film 3. Relativist perspectivism: the cabinet of Dr. Caligari 4. Metaphysics of death: destiny 5. The nonsimultaneity of the simultaneous: rhythm 21 6. Natural history: the holy mountain Epilogue. The Weimar analogy: metropolis and the global present Notes Bibliography Index

Nicholas Baer is Assistant Professor of German at the University of California, Berkeley, with affiliations in Film & Media, Critical Theory, and Jewish Studies. He is coeditor of The Promise of Cinema: German Film Theory, 1907–1933; Unwatchable; and Technics: Media in the Digital Age.

"This remarkable intellectual history excavates the scope and significance of the reaction against the entrenched ‘historicism’ that engaged German critics and filmmakers in the 1920s. . . . Baer’s signal achievement, however, is in the compelling case he makes that motion picture film was formally inextricable from philosophical thought about the mechanical device and its image that defined perception as well as delivered representations of the world. . . . A model for our time."

• ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction1. Historical Turns 2. Things as they could have happened: Siegfried Kracauer and the historical film 3. Relativist perspectivism: the cabinet of Dr. Caligari 4. Metaphysics of death: destiny 5. The nonsimultaneity of the simultaneous: rhythm 21 6. Natural history: the holy mountain Epilogue. The Weimar analogy: metropolis and the global present Notes Bibliography Index