The manner in which certain identities and subjectivities perform within narratives help to reproduce and reassert the rewards of being a good citizen whilst concomitantly projecting the perils of being ideologically-subversive. Marxist sociologist Siegfried Kracauer engaged with some of these issues as early as 1947 within his seminal work From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of German Film. Here, Kracauer argued that early Weimar cinema and its characte constructions not only served to reflect the contemporary culture which produced them, but also served to unearth certain underlying truths that were not immediately obvious (in this case, anticipating Germanyβs embrace of fascism). Kracauer depicted film and its images as a form of cultural mirror that could be studied to better understand the world and culture that produced them.
