The Sensitive Manifestations of Modern Man

From Metropolitan Aesthetics to Cinema as Redemption: Simmel, Balázs, Kracauer

Abstract

Modern life originated a new human type living in large urban agglomerations for the first time, as Simmel investigates in 1903 in The Metropolis and Mental Life. In the metropolis, processes of fragmentation and individualization caused by monetary economics drive individuals to both the need of emerging out of the mass – with their own personality and social role, by displaying their quality on «the surface», including their own body – and the need of preserving their senses from an excess of stimuli. In the meantime, the cinema is gaining its status as autonomous art capable of expressing the desires and impulses of the masses while influencing them, in a dialectical relationship. Following Simmel’s teachings and methodological approach, Kracauer attributes the emerging of a deeper collective unconscious to those «surface manifestations of an epoch», thus bordering the unexplored field of visual culture («Visuelle Kultur») introduced by Béla Balázs in The Twenties. From Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror to the warning signs of National Socialism, the visual culture evolving in the 1920s unfolds new aesthetic-perceptive interpretations of modernity.