To Record and Reveal the “Flow of Life” of the Subaltern — Focusing on All We Imagine as Light (2024)

This paper explores how Siegfried Kracauer’s five affinities of film—realism, fortuity, endlessness, indeterminacy, and the flow of life— serve as critical strategies for rendering the subaltern visible within cinematic media. Building on Kracauer’s proposition that film enables modern individuals to “alienate themselves,” this study examines how cinema captures the fragmented, contingent, and opaque material realities of marginalized lives that often remain invisible in dominant representational systems. Through the case study of All We Imagine as Light, this paper demonstrates how films can record the gestures, sensations, and daily flows of subaltern subjects, not as transparent narratives but as traces of existence embedded in movement, objects, and spatial transitions. Kracauer’s theory offers a framework that extends beyond film aesthetics to engage with the political ethics of representing those who are structurally excluded from speech and visibility.