This significant study is certain to be the standard work on the subject for many years to come. It demonstrates once and for all that motion pictures differ radically from the traditional arts, and that good plays or novels rarely make good films. Dr. Kracauer is concerned with film as a photographic medium uniquely equipped to capture and reveal the everyday world as it exists before our eyes. "If film is an art," he writes, "it is an art with a difference. It fulfills itself in rendering 'the ripple of leaves, ' . . . street crowds, involuntary gestures, and other fleeting impressions."
Dr. Kracauer covers every aspect of black-and-white film. He discusses its background in still photography, the problems inherent in historical and fantasy films, the novel as a cinematic form, experimental films, documentaries, the role of the actor, the uses of dialogue and sound, the contribution of music, and the part played by the spectator.
The final chapter focuses on the wider implications of the medium. There Dr. Kracauer sets the cinema "in the perspective of something more general-an approach to the world, a mode of human existence," and thus shows how it reflects the condition of modern man, the moral temper of our society. Theory of Film is an intellectual experience which reaches far beyond film into the realm of general aesthetics and philosophy.