Theodor W. Adorno. Transparencies on Film [November 1966]. Trans. Thomas Y. Levin.

New
German Critique 24/25 (Winter 1981-2): 199-205.
I love to go to the movies; the only thing that bothers me is the image on the screen. (Adorno,
according to Alexander Kluge)
I.
Adorno defends the alternative project of Young German Film, seeing it as an oppositional
endeavor, a reaction to the excesses of the German culture industry. It does not heed the dictates
of the conventional cinema. The dominant commercial interests defend themselves by attacking
these neophytes and upstarts for their unpolished and unprofessional films. This is ludicrous given
the infantile nature of the established film industrys products (regression manufactured on an
industrial scale) over its sixty-year history. Adorno speaks up for a new generation of filmmakers
and their initial features, films that lack the polish and the perfection of their elders productions:
In this comparatively awkward and unprofessional cinema, uncertain of its effects, is
inscribed the hope that the so-called mass media might eventually become
something qualitatively different.
Works which have not completely mastered their technique, conveying as a result
something consolingly uncontrolled and accidental, have a liberating quality.
II.
Characters in film should not speak in the same stilted manner as figures in a novel (e.g., as in
Schlndorffs Young Trless). To the extent that film is realistic, the semblance of immediacy is
unavoidable--and, indeed, film has to find its own special ways of conveying immediacy. One
cannot present film characters who talk in the highflown manner of a novel or a stage play.
Perhaps improvisation--the systematic surrender to unguided chance--is an option.
III.
Films late arrival (already in the age of mechanical reproducibility) makes it difficult for us to
distinguish between
--technique and
--technology (i.e., the changes brought by mechanical reproducibility).
Films technique seems to be but a function of its technology. (This undercuts the role of
creativity, the artist, and the subject.) As Benjamin claims, the cinema has no original; the mass
product is the thing itself; the cinemas techniques of mass reproduction and distribution are the
very basis of its artistic processes.
Miriam Hansen: The logic of mechanical reproduction--inextricably bound up with
economic dependency and ideological complicity--so completely controls all processes of
film production that any concept of artistic technique appears to be subsumed by it.
If one is to create a theory of film technique, one would do well to base it on a subjective mode
of experience which film resembles and which constitutes its artistic character. Film should
foreground the role of intentionality (subjectivity) in both representation and construction. Film
might present an experience similar to the revery of interior monologue, a discontinuous flow of
images:
Such movement of interior images may be to film what the visible world is to painting
or the acoustic world to music. As the objectifying recreation of this type of
experience, film may become art.
Film is the technological medium par excellence; it nonetheless has intimate links to the beauty of
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nature. (Cf. Benjamins vision of film as the blue flower in the land of technology.)
Adorno suggests that spectators may well partake of culture industry products in independent and
unintended ways; there is, he intimates a potential gap between conscious intentions and actual
effects.
Comment: Here Adornos thoughts on reception diverge markedly from his previous
elitist notions. The spectator described here is not subject to total manipulation and
delusion, but rather has a mind of his/her own. We find no condescension towards those
who allow mass culture to manufacture their desires.
Adorno presents a more dynamic view of the spectator appeal in the product itself,
differentiating between official models of behavior and the unofficial ones which provide
the attraction (Hansen).
Although the culture industry aims to manipulate the masses, its products cannot anticipate every
possible response. In fact, the culture industry is as internally antagonistic as the society it seeks to
control. Its products provoke contrary and contradictory effects: The ideology of the culture
industry contains the antidote to its own lie. No other plea could be made for its defense.
Cf. an earlier draft to the Culture Industry essay: Because human beings, as subjects,
still constitute the limit of reification, mass culture has to renew its hold over them in an
endless series of repetitions; the hopeless effort of repetition is the only trace of hope that
the repetition may be futile, that human beings cannot be totally controlled.
IV.
Films process places a higher stress on the object than the established arts; this makes it harder to
speak of subjective experience and true art. The medium involves a deceptive identity of image
and referent.
Commentary: Note Adornos fundamental distrust of films visual immediacy. It
provides a powerful ideological tool for dominant culture or for a culture that seeks to
dominate:
It is not simply that film under capitalism is a commodity; it is that film reproduces the
structure of the commodity in the aesthetic realm. The relationship between image and
referent in the mechanically reproduced image mirrors the relationship established
between use value and exchange value in the commodity. Just as use value appears to
ensure that exchange value can function as an index of need, so the referent appears to
anchor the image in reality. Doubly infused with the rationality of the exchange function,
the aesthetic experience of film does indeed offer a reconciliation of instrumental reason
and mimetic experience (Richard Allen).
Film does not permit, even in cases of intense stylization, absolute construction or a distance from
reality: Its elements, however abstract, always retain something representational; they are never
purely aesthetic values. Society therefore responds to film differently than to the other arts; it
projects differently as well. To talk about film means to talk about objects marked by social
experience [and the ideology of the status quo].
There can be no aesthetics of the cinema, not even a purely technological one, which would not
include the sociology of the cinema.
Adorno offers a harsh critique of Kracauers Theory of Film: Kracauer celebrates films
redemption of physical reality (objects presumably cleansed of subjective meaning) without
taking into account its objects social determination. For Adorno, the book provides an exercise in
sociological abstention.
V.
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Benjamin, likewise, celebrates distraction, the experience in the cinema, without considering how
intertwined film is with the world of circulating commodities. Realist aesthetics (like Kracauers
Theory of Film) claim film should simply disclose the surface of reality and not attempt to impose
additional meanings. Film faces the dilemma of finding a procedure which neither lapses into
arts-and-crafts nor slips into a mere documentary mode. How, though, to do justice to reality
and, at the same time, to art? One answer today would be an approach (Adorno calls it
montage) that does not interfere with things but rather arranges them in a constellation akin to
that of writing.
Commentary: Alexander Kluge likewise stresses the power of the spaces between images,
interruptions in the seamless flow of sights and sounds, spaces for the spectators reflection and
intervention, sites where viewers can construct their own film in their
heads.
Hansen: Only through montage which negates the affirmative appeal of the image and
interrupts the chains of associative automatism can film become a medium of cognition.
But pure montage (as advocated by Benjamin and Kracauer) maintains a refusal to interpret. Who
says (as Kracauer claims in Theory of Film) that meaning will nonetheless emerge from the
reproduced material? Adorno goes a step further; perhaps the refusal to interpret, to add
subjective ingredients, is in itself a subjective act and as such a priori significant. The individual
subject who remains silent speaks not less but more through silence than when speaking
aloud.
In this case, then, less might become more: aesthetic restraint becomes a mark of resistant art. For
the moment, films greatest promise lies in its interaction with other media, which also are
reaching out to film.
VI.
Film appeals to collectives, to the masses; its constitutive subject is a we--here its aesthetic and
sociological aspects converge. Because film exercises such a great suggestive power (its mimetic
impulses incite viewers to fall into step), it easily lends itself to political abuse. As a medium where
anything goes, film can readily become a vehicle to lead people astray. A liberated film praxis
seeks to enlist the mediums collective appeal in the service of emancipatory intentions.
VII.
Film technology has developed techniques that relativize the realism inherent in the photographic
process (e.g., soft-focus, superimposition, flashbacks). But these techniques are superfluous and
not really essential to the medium. They have become mere conventions; we recognize them as
such and they appear to us as mere kitsch. They simply show off (fetishize) cinematic means.
There is a lesson here: emancipated film technique (the great hope for the medium) should not
depend uncritically upon technology. What one needs is a meaningful relationship between
technique, material, and content.
VIII.
The dominant cinema (Papas Kino/Daddys Cinema) is what the masses want--or at least what
they are led to think they want. In fact, the Culture Industry does not necessarily offer the art that
the consumer wants; such a claim is in fact the ideology of ideology. The Culture Industry is based
on calculated effect, the implementation of the low and trivial. It claims to give the masses what
they want, basing its appeal on supply and demand: this is the economic technique of consumer
exploitation. The culture industry reproduces itself and the audience in its own image. It is not
enough that consumers simply remain consumers; the culture industry wants them to become even
bigger and better consumers. That is why the culture industry is not the art of the consumer but
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rather the projection of the will of those in control onto their victims. The automatic selfreproduction of the status quo in its established forms is itself an expression of domination.
IX.
Previews and main attractions have become indistinguishable: everything is an advertisement that
bears a commodity character: Every commercial film is actually only the preview of that
which it promises and will never deliver.
X.
Wouldnt it be nice if artless films were todays works of art? How one despises those pretentious
quality films, the commercial industrys bad conscience. But the standard fare (i.e., genre films)
is even worse. In integrated culture, one cannot even find solace in trash and bad movies.
Crucial texts by Adorno on mass culture:
On Jazz (1936).
The Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening (1938).
In Search of Wagner (written 1937-38, published 1952).
On Popular Music (1941).
The Radio Symphony (1941).
Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception, in Horkheimer/Adorno,
Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944).
Composing for the Films (1944, with Hanns Eisler).
A Social Critique of Radio Music (1945).
Minima Moralia: Reflections from the Damaged Life (1951).
Culture Industry Reconsidered (1963).