Adorno, Lewis Klahr and the Shuddering Image (original) (raw)

"Blind Representation": On the Epic Naiveté of the Cinema

Postmodern Culture, 2015

This essay argues that Theodor Adorno's reflections on the novel form respond to a problem that is focused in his commentaries on the cinema: how to develop forms of aesthetic rationality at a historical moment in which medium-specific aesthetic reflection may be obsolete. Adorno's commentaries on novelistic and filmic language register this historical situation of art. At the same time, this line of thought serves a crucial underlying interest of Adorno's aesthetic theory-to maintain art's thought of uneven development, its vanishing distinction from the technological forms of its social context. FULL TEXT In The Language of New Media (2001), Lev Manovich calls attention to an oddity in the development of computer-generated images in film. These images, in films such as Terminator 2 (1991) and Jurassic Park (1993), initially appeared "too perfect" or "too real." In order to appear like photographic images, the computer graphics of these films needed to be "degraded": "their perfection had to be diluted to match the imperfection of film's graininess" (201-02). This effect was achieved, for example, by reducing the resolution of the computer-generated images or softening their edges through computer-generated algorithms, procedures that allowed the images to blend with film footage. The unwelcome excessive detail and sharpness of computer-generated images, and the attempt to overcome this quality, suggest an ambiguous regression in technical development, a movement that proceeds in opposing directions simultaneously, forward and backward: at once a technological advancement and an apparent regression to the "imperfection" or lack of technical mastery that marked an earlier stage of development. Framed in these terms, this moment echoes an earlier juncture in the history of thinking about film, one that also involved a discrepancy between the demands of cinematic work and the contemporary state of technological advancement. In his 1966 commentary "Transparencies on Film," Theodor Adorno notes the particular situation of cinema at the moment he is writing, in which "awkward and unprofessional cinema" may play a certain role: While in autonomous art anything lagging behind the already established technical standard does not rate, vis-à-vis the culture industry-whose standard excludes everything but the predigested and the already integrated, just as the cosmetic trade eliminates facial wrinkles-works which have not completely mastered their technique, conveying as a result something consolingly uncontrolled and accidental, have a liberating quality. (199) Adorno's interest in film aesthetics is usually associated with his attempt to think about cinematic construction or montage, which would run counter to the semblance of mimetic immediacy in the filmic medium. In the passage cited above, however, we get a different scenario: the construction of film as art is apparently seen as involving not an imminent progress or mastery of cinematic technique, but rather a relaxing or deterioration of such technique.

Film as a mobilizing agent? Adorno and Benjamin on aesthetic experience

This article evaluates the role of art – particularly mechanically reproduced forms of art – in the writings of Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno. The central claim is that both thinkers share the same conviction as to the emancipatory potentials of the work of art. Yet, they evaluate the effects of technological innovation differently. The underpinnings of this later resolved discord, however, are philosophical. In contrast to Benjamin's belief in the possibility of mass mobilization, for Adorno the relevant category remains unequivocally the individual subject.

Thoughts on Film: Critically engaging with both Adorno and Benjamin

Educational Philosophy and Theory, 2014

There is a traditional debate in analytic aesthetics that surrounds the classification of film as Art. While much philosophy devoted to considering film has now moved beyond this debate and accepts film as a mass art, a sub-category of Art proper, it is worth re-considering the criticism of film pre-Deleuze. Much of the criticism of film as pseudo-art is expressed in moral terms. T. W. Adorno, for example, critiques film as ‘mass-cult’; mass produced culture which presents a ‘flattened’ version of reality. Adorno worries about the passivity encouraged in viewers. Films are narrative artworks, received by an audience in a context, making the focus on the reception of the work important. The dialogue held between Adorno and Walter Benjamin post-WWII is interesting because, between them, they consider both the possible positive emancipatory and negative politicization effects of film as a mass produced and distributed story-telling medium. Reading Adorno alongside Benjamin is a way to highlight the role of the critical thinker who receives the film. Arguing that the critical thinker is a valuable citizen, this paper focuses on the value of critical thinking in the reception of cinematic artworks. It achieves this by reconsidering Adorno and Benjamin's theories of mass art.