Kracauer's Inherent Affinities

In Siegfried Kracauer's essay Inherent Affinities he lays out the five affinities of film and photography, examining, "their extended scope and their specifically cinematic implications." (299). Four of the five affinities, which seem to be characteristic of film should be identical with those of photography." (299). Those four affinities are as follows: The Unstaged: "film, notwithstanding its ability to reproduce, indiscriminately, all kinds of visible data, gravitates toward unstated reality." (300) The Fortuitous: Film and photography are attracted by the fortuitous, such as Keaton narrowly avoiding being crushed by the wall of his flimsy self-assembled house in One Week. Endlessness: Film and photography's ability to record almost everything put in front of it. The Indeterminate: The notion that what is being filmed or photographed transcends singular meanings, depending on context, culture or any other number of influences. The fifth affinity is what Kracauer calls The "Flow of Life" which is specific to cinema because of photography's inability to show movement. I am interested in how this "flow of life" truly distinguishes film from photography, aside from the obvious animation of pictures created when film is played. The four affinities listed above all factor into creating cinematic films that, "evoke a reality more inclusive than the one they actually picture."(304) He then talks about the "flow of life" in relation to the street, an idea both Kracauer and Eisenstein are quite fond of, with its numerous people, cars, signs, buildings and movement which make it "the scene of life." (305). In the background of a film (take your pick) a man walking down the street through throngs of people has an untold story of untold possibilities and that story will forever remain untold, which is an odd thing to think about. It's why a passerby completely uninvolved to the narrative of the film is what stuck with Eisenstein twenty years after last seeing Intolerance. This is what I understand to be "the flow of life" that cinematic films depict. My question is what really distinguishes the "flow of life" as being purely cinematic? Couldn't the same type of sentiment Eisenstein found so lasting in the passerby in Intolerance be attributed to somebody in the background of a photograph?