Hermann Häfker: il cinematografo come sguardo utopico sul mondo

Abstract

This contribution illuminates the work of German film critic pioneer Hermann Häfker, who dedicated an influential essay to the relation between film and geography (Kino und Erdkunde) as early as in 1914. Häfker was active in the German movement for a film reform since the first decade of the Twentieth century, and Kino und Erdkunde, on the one hand, represents a passionate defense of an educational use of film in schools and public institutions, expressing the most progressive debates of contemporary cultural life, but, on the other hand, it shows the ideological limits and anxieties of a utopian and positivist “geographical” thinking just at the dawn of WWI crisis.