ADORNO - Composing For The Film PDF

157
Lea Dovev
Film Music as Film Critique
Adorno/Eisler on an Apocryphal Branch of Art
1

Composing for the Films was, and perhaps still is, an unfortunate book.
2

An outsider-classic in the eld of lm music theory, the works dubious
renown was quite limited even within this particular discourse, which,
generally speaking, can hardly be considered as abundant or thoroughly
mapped, let alone researched, before the 1980s. Apparently, this is not
extraordinary. One can see why such an enthusiastic lm readership,
which may not be initially committed to the Adornian lan, would tend
to ignore this text altogether, or at least regard it with a certain disdain,
as being of little relevance to the variegated, history-rich workings of
lm hermeneutics, lm production and lm reception. Such a readership
could certainly detect in this 1947 book a dated bias, even at the time
of its publication. To single out a characteristic example, Michel Chion,
a major contributor to the discourse on music and sound in the cinema
today, categorizes this work as having a particular approach.
3
Given Adorno/Eislers fundamental theses, in which their concrete
analyses and critical propositions are grounded, this seems almost self-ev-
ident. But for years this book was also considered marginal in the frame-
work of Adornos uvre within the philosophers own circle of presumed
followers. I am afraid it still is.
1 Te idea of history [is] not applicable to such an apocryphal branch of art.
Teodor W. Adorno/Hanns Eisler, Composing for the Films [1947] (here-
inafter referred to as CF), with a new introduction by Graham McCann,
London, 1994, here: 49.
2 Te rst manuscript of CF was written in German by Adorno and Eisler
between 1940 and 1944 in the U.S., sponsored by a Rockefeller grant. Te
book was rst published in English in 1947, authored by the composer
Hanns Eisler only, without Adornos name. Eisler republished a modied
version in German in 1949 under his name alone. Adorno published another
modied, coauthored version, in German, in 1969 (see Teodor W. Adorno,
Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 15, Frankfurt/Main 1997). All quotations in this
article are taken from the 1994 edition by Athlone Press, London (fn. 1).
3 Michel Chion, Le son au cinma, Paris 1992, 214.
Theodor W. Adorno - Philosoph des beschdigten Lebens
Wallstein Verlag, Gttingen 2004
158
It is an uncomfortable and sometimes frustrating hybrid of a book,
conrms Graham McCann,
4
who attributes this weakness to the coau-
thors deep-seated and lifelong dierences, bearing upon the inevitably
troubled nature of their relationship,
5
and especially to the extent that
Adornos critical philosophy concerning the culture industry (which,
when all is said and done, McCann seems to have little taste for) over-
powered Eislers practical mastery of the issues at hand.
6
Conversely, yet
in a parallel perspective, one of Adornos most knowledgeable and percep-
tive readers, Richard Leppert, has recently claimed (in his monumental
English compilation of Adornos writings on music) that Reading this
book is somewhat frustrating compared to Adornos other work on music
[] too much of the text reads too familiarly and it lacks nuance.
7
It
is also deemed too practical, at times acquiring the odd cha r acter of a
formulaic how-to book. For Leppert, this is due to Eislers inuence. In
his brief, excellent presentation, Leppert attaches little signicance to the
pregnant tensions immanent in this works novelty. Indeed, he notes that,
whereas on the one hand Composing for the Films repeats basic ideas,
on the other hand it is a fairly explicit design for a progressive musi-
cal praxis within mass culture [italics mine], something Adorno did
not otherwise propose until very near the end of his life.
8
Nevertheless,
Leppert does not insist on this dimension of the otherwise too familiar
book, and apparently for him it does not counterbalance the texts overt
predicament.
In the following pages I envisage another point of view. I shall sug-
gest considering this books quasi-neglected insights and commendations
in the framework of past and present discourses on lm within an eye-
centered culture and its discontents. As such, its hour has come. Along
these lines, it may be argued that CF is considerably more signicant in
Adornos work than it may seem. As the books strictures develop gradu-
4 Graham McCann, Introduction, CF, ix.
5 Ibid., xxvii and passim.
6 Today, fty years after H. Eisler and W. Adorno began their remarkable
project [] one may disagree with some of its arguments, but one can still
appreciate the rare critical respect it shows to a subject seldom taken serious-
ly. Ibid., viii. McCann also urges his readers to realize that it is extremely
important that one places this critique [Culture Industry] in its proper his-
torical context. (ibid., xxiv).
7 Teodor W. Adorno, Essays on Music, Selected with Introduction, Com-
mentary and Notes by Richard Leppert, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London
2002, 365.
8 Ibid.

159
ally toward a recognition of questions of degrees and viabilities, its un-
decided, shifting character can no longer be taken for a setback. It is
the collaboration with the tragic, politically committed, gifted Hanns
Eisler that actually gave Adorno a chance to rethink the very doctrine
of radical critical theory (including its latently messianic resistance to
name the unnamable the other). I believe that the dialogue with this
unidentical brother [unidentische Bruder]
9
forced him to re-examine
his (and Max Horkheimers) perspective on the culture industry and its
future; and consequently, to reassess his former attitude toward some of
the issues raised by Walter Benjamin in his 1936 essay Te Work of Art
in the Time of Mechanical Reproduction. For both Adorno and Eisler,
but more so for Adorno, I claim, it was a momentous encounter and a
rich matrix of openness, and it is possible that the ostensibly narrow,
quasi-technical and low-impact topic of Composing for the Films could
thus become a blessing.
Seen in this light, the fact that Adorno preferred in 1947 not to pro-
fess his coauthorship in the initial publication may be grasped as more
signicant than a merely circumstantial attempt to keep clear of Eislers
troubles with the House Un-American Activities Committee. Moreover,
that Adorno himself later owned up in private correspondence to having
written 90 percent of the book may thus be read as perhaps less mean
and more revealing than it looks. It may hint at something akin to an af-
terthought endeavor to come to terms with that which the confrontation
must have entailed for him.
*
Following is a condensed outline of the main theses of Composing for the
Films, considering that it is a relatively little-read book:
1. Te cinema is a paradigmatic site of the culture industry. It is not an
art of the masses (CF, li).
2. Te historical sources of cinema are twofold: It originates from
techniques of mechanical reproduction (photography and sound record-
ing), and marketplace entertainment. Cinema has nothing to do with
bourgeois (individualistic) literary or dramatic traditions. Tese two
origins fully determined cinemas past Materialgerechtigkeit history (i.e.,
the history of the adequacy of means to the material and the medium),
and will shape its future.
9 Detlev Claussen, Teodor W. Adorno. Ein letztes Genie, Frankfurt/Main
2003, 183.
iiix xusic as iiix ciiriqui
160
3. Like the entire culture industry, yet most conspicuously so, cin-
ema parasitically thrives on products of old individualistic age (CF,
lii). Hence, any attempt to endow lms with the negativity inherent in
the pre-culture industry art through absorption and adaptation is
aesthetically futile and politically airmative, and thus regressive.
4. Cinema is truly and exclusively visual. In essence it is photography
of motions. In category (as distinct from origin) it is related to ballet and
pantomime. Motion pictures are intrinsically mute, for Speech presup-
poses man as self, rather than the primacy of gesture (CF, 77).
5. Vision and hearing constitute and reect dierent modes of sub-
jecthood. Whereas vision is distancing, hearing is enveloping and com-
munal. Te eye is adapted to bourgeois rationality, conceiving reality
as made up of separate things, commodities, objects that can be modi-
ed by practical activity (CF, 20). Te ear is archaic, passive, and not
in keeping with present cultural anthropology; it is antithetical to the
deniteness of material things (CF, 20).
6. Music is supposed to bring out the spontaneous, essentially human
element in its listeners, and in virtually all human relations (CF, 20).
It is deemed a universal signier of tamed non-mediation: irrationality
dealt with rationally.
7. Concomitantly, in lms music signals the decay, limits or impotence
of language.
8. Te function of music in cinema is an extreme version of the gener-
al function of music under conditions of industrially controlled cultural
consumption (CF, 20). Musics pretended aura of authenticity is thus
doubly compromised in cinema. Its use consolidates the manipulative
eectiveness of the culture industry, while undermining one of the last
venues of subversion in late-capitalist modernity, namely, autonomous
music.
9. Music is a foreign body in the eye of cinema. It should be enhanced
as such. Its fuzzy semantic can and should be made to thwart lmic (pre-
posterous) visuality and cast doubts upon the apparent linkage of picture,
sequence, narrative and meaning. Being a numinous limen of sense (es-
pecially to the layman), music is a privileged site of auto-reexivity in a me-
dium otherwise prone to supercial over-factuality. Film claims to be pho-
tographed life. As such, every motion picture is a documentary (CF, 8).
10. Most promising in this regard are the musical idioms of modernity
(new music), as compared with the lexical, xed musical modules used
routinely (and degradingly) in the assembly-line lm industry.
11. At stake is oppression versus dignity, rather than good lms versus
bad ones.
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161
12. Te history of the new motion picture has not yet really begun
(CF, 116).
*
Doubts about the role and desirability of music in the cinema carry an
implicit heritage. Tey activate a conceptual repertory that was elabo-
rated and matured long before the early phases of cinema theory had
begun pondering if, and how, music can save the cinema, and be saved
for the cinema. An initial and continuous malaise inhabits the discourse
in which Adorno/Eislers criticism of the accumulated know-how of the
eld its day-to-day uses and abuses and the reform they trace in detail,
are grounded. Tis discourse has a dense climate of ideas for background,
and a ourishing intellectual history for origins, namely, the history that
shaped the ideological dimension of ainities, relative merits and aws,
and, more often than not, the incompatibilities of materials, means and
procedures in art. Emphatically, these include reections on music versus
the visual arts, orality versus visuality itself.
10
In the course of this history,
epistemological assumptions concerning the physiological discreteness of
the senses, plus their hierarchical stratication, were linked to value-lad-
en tenets of art theory concerning medium-specicity. Reciprocally, these
became, in turn, inseparable from the idea of self-contained organicity
as dependent upon an optimal economy of intra-medium means and
ends. It is a eld already cultivated in Renaissance trattati and dialoghi
whose core is the perennial tension between the idea of representation as
transparence, on the one hand, and the idea of medium as opacity, on
the other. It is, in other words, the topic that came to be known as the
competition of the arts.
Te core of the matter, nally, is meaning itself: modes and boundaries
of transferability. At work is an essentialist aesthetic ideology, bearing
upon the normativity of the mediums nature in general, going back to
Aristotle. Tis in turn leads to the ascetic rule of maximizing medium-
specic intelligence out of its dening limitations. Terefore, something
cheap and platitudinous seems to hang upon the mixing of media. Te
old Aristotelian inhibition regarding the metabasis of categories (onto-
logical and epistemological) lives on. A universal presupposition regard-
ing cinema as an essentially visual medium excludes a priori, or at least
10 I present music as a regulative idea in the history of self-aware painting (and
as pivotal to this history) in my book Six Modes of Painting/Music, Jerusa-
lem 2003 (Hebrew).
162
problemizes, the lmic auditory dimension speech, noise and music:
superuous at worst, subversive at best. It is revealing that the lmic
amalgamation as such, say Adorno/Eisler, is Wagnerian in origin, spirit
and outcome redundant and overindulgent. Te idea is omnipresent in
their book: a far-reaching, tacit doctrine of origins-essen tialism, trans-
lated into the overt insistence that lm was born from photography and
not from literature or dramaturgy. Tis, of course, is a permanent and
self-acknowledged problematic for Adorno.
11

*
Is music indispensable to lm? Generally speaking, the unanimous
answer is negative. To be sure, bad movies cannot get away without
music [] but what we wish to determine is, if a lm whose visual dia-
lectic is solid, whose dramatic qualities are well airmed [] does such a
movie require music or not? Let us answer unhesitatingly: it can do with-
out.
12
Tis is a recurring theme in the leading French discourse of the
subject since the 1930s (probably unknown to Adorno or Eisler): music
was often lamented for being made to function as a pleonastic ller for
a lm in which the script, the dialogue, the camera work and the editing
were poorly managed. As early as 1936, and thereafter, Maurice Jaubert
was articulating this position clearly and elaborating ideas for reform.
13

Tis project was to make him the authority on which, to quote Christian
Metz, the majority of lm theoreticians dealing with this subject have
drawn and developed.
14
Jaubert argued that music in lms should not
interact with the image by way of explicating the narrative. To avoid
triviality harmful to image and sound alike it should be made to
coalesce into a medium-specic, audio-visual rhythmicality. Tus, the
real-time duration and the ctive time of the plot come to be played one
against the other to form the specic temporality and time-awareness
of lmic experience. In this, Jaubert codies for all mass-audience lm
11 Derogatory essentialist thematizations of music in the cinema must be dif-
ferentiated from criticisms of manual-like morphological and functional
taxonomies (such as, in the early days of cinema, the notorious tables of
Giuseppe Becce, indicating what piece of music suits what lmic situation.
Tese, as Adorno/Eisler note with distaste, have become building blocks of
accepted practice for a whole century).
12 Henri Colpi, Dfence et illustration de la musique de lm, Lyon 1961.
13 Maurice Jaubert, La musique dans le cinma, in: Esprit (April 1936).
14 Christian Metz, Current Problems of Film Teory, in: Screen Reader 2
(1981), 38-85.
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163
production to come, the lessons and bearings of the earliest praxis and
theory of abstract and surrealist cinema.
Pierre Schaeer, in his three seminal essays on Llement non visuel
au cinma (1946),
15
sees the issue in similar terms: Music has no im-
portance whatsoever in lms, and it is not necessary. Any music will
do [nimporte quelle musique fera laaire] [] music is a good girl. It
is the ideally elastic material. With minimal care it will give the maxi-
mum. What he has in mind is an acute shift from musique-illustration to
musique-matriau. Tis is to be achieved by means of metaphoric coun-
terpoint: masking appearances, optimizing eects of gaps and discrepan-
cies (dcalage); playing with noise against musical articulation, and so
on. Schaeer is much more cautious about rhythm synchronization than
Jaubert (or, for that matter, Eisenstein). Indeed, he advocates rhythmic-
formal unison rather than interpolations of quasi-illustrative musical
backups into the photographed drama. Tis would optimize the abstract
properties of visual movement that is the core-specicity of the cinematic
medium. But, he observes with perspicacity, such a match is also likely
to generate a comical or unreal eect if undertaken with little heed to
the relative swiftness of visual perception against the slowness of auditory
perception. (A comparable argument may be found in CF.) Structural
synchronization for Schaeer, again, is to be only the regulative idea of
movement as such, against which music as non-pleonastic counterpoint
can become musique-matriau: a distinct presentness allusive, critical,
ironic, reexive. A generation later, Jean Mitry would develop Jauberts
and Schaeers ideas into a full-edged theory of music in lms as a sig-
nal of gaps and partial or insuicient visual data, and hence as a trigger
for actively interpretative spectatorship.
16
Christian Metzs comments on
Mitry would enrich the discourse yet further. Te entire eld resonates
with discontent over eye-centered culture so emphatic in multi-faceted
philosophical, rather than narrowly cinematic, criticism of modernity it-
self.
*
Intriguingly, if CFs theses posited above (with the exception of the one
regarding the potential of the new musical idioms) may seem at rst
15 Pierre Schaeer, Llment non visuel au cinma, in: Revue du cinma 1, 2
and 3 (1946).
16 Jean Mitry, Esthtique et psychologie du cinma, Paris 1963 (vol. ii, chapter
12: La parole et le son).
164
glance to promise little regarding the prescriptive project at hand, Ador-
no/Eislers maxims their dos and donts as far as the praxis of lm
music goes turn out to reiterate or even pregure (in principle as well as
in detail) the commendations of the eminent avatars and codiers of the
eld. From the early, rather value-neutral history traced by Kurt London
17

to the developed percepts of Maurice Jaubert or Pierre Schaeer, all the
way to the nely-threaded conceptual plenitude of Jean Mitry, a consist-
ent voice is heard throughout the eld, and it is at one with the Adornian/
Eisler endeavor, namely the pursuit of ways to optimize the interpolations
of musical sound in lms so as to thwart lmic visuality and cast doubts
upon the apparent linkage of picture, sequence, narrative and meaning.
Te shiftiness of musical dodges should function as signals of non-closure.
Tey should constitute a sphere of reexivity within a medium otherwise
prone to fall prey to the deception of apparent givenness.
At the end of the day, these suggestions for reform echo the combative
radicalism, sometimes even the bad temper of CF, yet they argue their
case from the wisdom of the craft alone, out of internal considerations.
Self-determining factors of the mtier are actually set and promulgated
within the boundaries of what may be termed a Materialgerechtigkeit the-
ory (whether acknowledged under this title or not is of little dierence).
Te adequacy of means to the material and the medium as such, or,
locally, to a project under examination you name it can of course be
explored and stated in dierent ways. Object-oriented and reception-
oriented considerations may or may not coincide in material-adequacy
theories. But clearly, these can be established independently of a theory of
sociopolitical economy of production and consumption. Tey seem ca-
pable of formulating guidelines for lm music that correspond in detail
to the logic of the culture industry critic, yet without recourse to Adorno/
Eislers philosophical habitat of political engagement, nor to the one or
the others mutatis mutandis socially redemptive horizon of hope.
Some instances in the history of lm music are enlightening in this
respect. Cineastes such as Ingmar Bergman (throughout his work, and
especially in Trough the Glass Darkly) or Stanley Kubrick (obtrusively
so in Odyssey 2001) have worked with non-pleonastic and idiosyncratic
linkage of music and narrative. Tis linkage was achieved by way of an-
tithetical juxtapositions and clashes of ambiguous, ironical, seemingly
alien mu sical citations, inlays and associations. Such musical riddles, in
fact, turned into the main hermeneutic thread within the lmic whole,
requiring the spectator to have a quite solid knowledge of music (re-
17 Kurt London, Film Music [1936], New York 1970.
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165
ception) history in order to fully grasp their complexity. Yet, to judge
from extant work diaries, interviews and other material, these directors
musical subtleties were not premeditated and not part of the original
script. Rather, they materialized as the work progressed, or even after
its completion or during the nal editing. Tus, they obviously did not
originate from any theoretical paradigm of non-pleonasms of the kind
traced above, Adorno/Eislers CF included.
Adorno, of course, had an ambivalent relationship with the tempta-
tions of the Materialgerechtigkeit theory throughout his work. Tis theory
verged on the axial Adornian postulate of the autonomous historicity of
all media, famously problematic (and unresolved) in the philosophers
aesthetic discourse in its totality, and especially so in his writings on mu-
sic. Disparaged as relativism-prone and politically indierent, yet con-
stituting an ever abidingly relevant challenge, the claims of Materialge-
rechtigkeit theory constitute the tacit background of CF. Adornos voice
rings clear when he states that Which technical resources should be used
in art should be determined by intrinsic requirements (CF, liii). Te
next argument could, rather, be Eislers: Technology opens up unlim-
ited opportunities for art in the future, and even in the poorest motion
pictures there are moments when such opportunities are strikingly ap-
parent (Ibid.). Ten, I can imagine hearing Adorno comment: But the
same principle that opened up these opportunities also ties them to big
business (Ibid.). Still and this comes through in the book again and
again Adorno would not and could not endorse the rich and rapidly
developing technical possibilities of the cinema: not primarily because
they were part of the big business system, but rather because his taste,
as well as his theoretical commitment, were rooted in an aesthetic of es-
sentialist scar city.
*
Film, the paradigmatic product of the culture industry, epitomizes the
decay of language and the primacy of sight concomitant with this decay.
Vision establishes the xity of all otherness as material and a-temporal,
voiceless and identitarian givenness. It is instrumental to reication and
appropriation. Te eye, say Adorno/Eisler, is actively selective, swift, sure,
constitutive; it xes its object in a settled frame, to behold and to hold.
Film works with gesture every motion picture is mute and the ideal
subject of lms is faceless, universal, possessive and uninvolved. Hearing,
on the other hand, is enveloping and open, temporal, objectless and his-
torically communal. If vision is concerned with the presentness of things
166
and with certainties, hearing is concerned with suspended presentness,
with that which is not there, with meaning and with memory. Tus, for
the post-industrial subject of mass culture, orality preserves the traces,
if not the promise, of pre-modern communality. In this frame of mind,
music can be made to serve the cause of undermining the mauvaise foi of
the lmic experience of sham communality. As the epitome of negativity
the paradigmatic bearer of secular theology and humane messianism
autonomous music retains this promise.
Summing up the dierent modes of subjecthood immanent in vision
versus hearing (and thus in the vision-bound product of culture as op-
posed to music), Adorno/Eisler write:
Roughly speaking, all music, including the most objective and non-
expressive, belongs primarily to the sphere of subjective inwardness,
whereas even the most spiritual painting is heavily burdened with un-
resolved objectivity. Motion-picture music, being at the mercy of this
relationship, should attempt to make it productive, rather than to ne-
gate its confused identication. (CF, 17)

Music, then, is called upon to redeem lm. It conserves its force even
when it becomes a lmic hybrid, when it is disintegrated and manipu-
lated according to the logic of lmic narration. It can be made to serve
this heroic project of refusal. CF is about the practicability and the ur-
gent need of doing this. It means suspending the tragic halo of autono-
mous music and mobilizing its lost ethical grandeur in the service of
shaking the foundations of mass culture itself. It involves undoing the
correspondences between the metrics of the seen and the heard and get-
ting rid of sonic anchors of identity-enhancement and narrational read-
ability, such as, notoriously, leitmotif and melody. Te idioms of New
Music can undermine the idea of banal, one-to-one, pinpointed expres-
sivity. Tey can dismantle the illusion of organic form, dismember easy
thematic continuity, and push irony and self-awareness to the extreme.
Te estrangement of the modern idiom itself, as far as the common lm
spectator is concerned, already subverts the illusion of xed denotation
and shakes the formulaic modes of commercial cinema. Tis idiom is
intrinsically hostile to the pretensions of innocent interiority and to the
ideological mirror-like duality of, on the one hand, the immanence of
musical order, and on the other hand, the would-be self-suiciency and
assumed defensibility of individuals living in an oppressive world. Inter-
rupted from within, this music is less susceptible to interruptions from
without, namely to the heteronomy of visual narration. It is more pliable,
say the authors. Based on the inner workings of fragmented tonality
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167
oating, interrupted or nonexistent the new idioms can help draw at-
tention to sham certainties and to pseudo-wholes.
In this, Adorno comes perilously close to Benjamins idea of how, from
the ashes of lost aura due to technical reproduction, the progressive po-
litical gains of tomorrow may emerge. For an almost outlandish moment
he seems ready to view lms as tools of a negative aesthetic. Te dier-
ences between the two, nonetheless, are salient. For Adorno, the promise
of political redemption through the undoing of the culture industry from
within has little to do with the fact of reproducibility in itself, contrary
to the way Benjamin had viewed it. Nor has it anything to do with the
physical experience of togetherness involved in lm spectatorship. Te
very opening paragraph of CF implies a direct disallowance of Benjamins
insights on lm in this regard: it states right away, prior to any further
qualications, that the culture industry (and hence lm) is not what the
authors term an art of the masses (CF, li). Music, so it turns out, may
help save the cinema through its resonance of (bourgeois) inwardness,
and through the activation of the non-closures immanent in its nature
and history. As such it is the hallmark of authentic subjecthood. To this
extent, music has nothing to do with the cinema as an art of the masses.
Moreover, music the art of the pre-modern, archaistic, communal ear
is there to question, not to airm, the claim of lm experience to ex-
press the masses, or to be of the masses. But Adorno/Eisler do suggest
that music could help make the cinema work for the masses against
the false-consciousness ideology of late capitalism, so eager to celebrate
the egalitarian virtues of the art of the masses. (Tis position necessar-
ily entails a tacit criticism of Benjamins apparent innocence, but not of
the latters political endeavor to engage popular forms of art against their
current abuse in a regressive society.)
Te preposition of in the weighty term art of the masses in this
context seems to carry dierent shades of meaning for Benjamin on the
one hand, and for Adorno/Eisler on the other hand. For the latter, an art
is of the masses only when it is created by the masses (and they insist
that such an art no longer exists or does not yet exist [CF, li]). Film,
of course, does not correspond to this a priori condition. For Benjamin,
however, the preposition of is considerably less exclusive. It may indi-
cate an art expressing the masses, or even intended for the masses. In the
second sense, Benjamins notion of the politicization of the aesthetic
famously culminating in cinema as the paradigmatic art of the masses
of the future is not foreign to the sense of lm redeemed by music, as
proclaimed by the authors of CF.
*
168
Te history of the new motion picture has not yet begun, Adorno/
Eisler wrote in Composing for the Films (CF, 116). Te book was written
between 1941 and 1944, but it is not the time and place that account for
this statement. Contrary to the insinuations in CF, Adorno seems never
to have reconciled himself to cinema, and never to have really envisaged
a true new history for it. Te intrinsic falsehood of the cinematic me-
dium, viewed as part and parcel of the culture industry, is fully registered
throughout his later work.
18
Shifting from argument to aversion and
back again, he may have felt obliged to reassess the dense foundations
of this aversion in his 1966 article Transparencies on Film published
in Die Zeit.
19
Te text clearly reects his feeling of being publicly sum-
moned to review his prevalent position on lms, in the face of the grow-
ing aspirations of contemporary cinma dauteur, and the accompanying
proliferation of rened theoretical thought, mainly outside the American
assembly-line studio system. Adornos starting point was Volker Schln-
dors Der junge Trless (1965-66), which retained whole segments of
Robert Musils text intact, incorporated into the dialogue. He considered
the failure of the lm, as he saw it, to be symptomatic. In Adornos judg-
ment, Musils text was not adaptable to cinema because it uses a recher-
ch false note of rationalization throughout and thus cannot function
simply as any other, though sensibly better, lmic dialogue.
20
But the
issue at hand, of course, is not Musils shortcomings in the role of an
18 I am grateful to Detlev Claussen for having enlightened me about Adornos
early and continuing movie-going habit and his love for the cinema. At the
Tel Aviv Adorno conference (November 2003) documented in this volume,
Claussen claimed that Adornos commentators were wrong about the phi-
losophers supposed relative lm-illiteracy, and even more so about his aver-
sion to the medium. Adornos intimate friendship with Fritz Lang, he noted,
must also be taken into account in this matter. (See Claussen, Adorno [fn. 9],
198-212.) Adorno, I might add, certainly makes it quite explicit that he had
a taste for excellent genre-specic grade B movies musical comedies, west-
erns, etc. (see, e.g., CF, 16, and likewise, Transparencies on Film [fn. 19]).
He loathed pretentious, grade A lms. But to my mind, if, and how, he was
capable of recognizing non-pretentious grade A lms at all, is another mat-
ter. And if, and how, his taste for the B grade acted for or against his grasp of
the mediums history and potentialities, remains to be probed more deeply.
19 Teodor W. Adorno, Filmtransparente, in: Die Zeit, November 18, 1966
(reprinted in idem, Ohne Leitbild. Parva Aesthetica, Frankfurt/Main 1967,
79). English translation: Transparencies on Film, in: New German Critique
24-25 (Fall/Winter 1981), 199.
20 Ibid., 200.
iia ooviv
169
imagined scriptwriter. Adorno argued that the real problem was that of
(temporal and corrigible?) immaturity: the artistic dierence between
the media is obviously still [italics mine] greater than expected by those
who feel able to avoid bad prose by adapting good one.
21
Terefore,
Adorno advocated intellectual cinematic strategies to learn from, and
interact with, the cinematographers betters, namely, media that hold to
the wisdom, the techniques and memory of the pre-culture industry and
pre-mass consumption era.
Tis tone sounds new, and seems to stand in contrast to the medium-
specicity convictions of CF regarding the origins and hence the future
destiny of cinema. But even in 1966 Adorno could hardly be consid-
ered optimistic in this regard. Te article, I am afraid, shows him to be
lacking in acute lm literacy and as skeptical as he was back in 1944-47.
He singles out as [a] worthy example of how the cinema did use such
[an] older medium namely, certain kinds of music,
22
and the model
he proposes is, not surprisingly, of little relevance to the hopes and prob-
lems of what was then discussed routinely as new cinema an intellec-
tual, psychological, theological and essentially non-American pursuit.
His idea of such a successful lesson was no less then Maurizio Kagels
Antithse (a 1965 television lm for a single performer with electronic
and everyday sounds). In this, let me add briey, Adorno reiterates a
common tendency, evident in so much of the writing on music in cinema
that argues from essence (i.e., essentialist writings), to oer tendentiously
abstract samples of art cinema paradigmatic, rare and extraordinary as
proof of the potential of high music to transcend the lmic medium and
emerge a winner. For that matter, the Kagel example functions rather
like another standby in the eld: say, Ren Clairs short lm Entreacte
(based on a scenario by Picabia with music by Eric Satie). Tis brings me
to the dilemma that the very concept of art cinema posited for Adorno
as far back as the 1947 CF. It is also the only context in which CF quotes
Benjamin and refers to him overtly.
Adorno/Eisler, in what seems like a joint attempt to face a crucial
diiculty, repeatedly dodged and crisscrossed the subject of art cinema
in their book in a kind of cats-cradle zigzag. Tey advanced, retracted,
doubted, tried various starting points, and doubted again. Here, for ex-
ample, is a revealing passage:
Te insurmountable heterogeneity of these media [pictures, words
and music in lms] furthers from the outside the liquidation of ro-
21 Ibid.
22 Ibid., 202 f.
170
manticism which is an intrinsic historical tendency within each art.
Te alienation of the media from each other reects a society alien-
ated from itself [] Terefore the aesthetic divergence of the media is
potentially a legitimate means of expression, not merely a regrettable
deciency that has to be concealed as well as possible. (CF, 74)
Teir conclusion, which follows immediately thereafter, is rather in-
coherent. For the coauthors say: And this is perhaps the fundamental
reason why many light-entertainment pictures that fall far below the pre-
tentious standards of the usual movie seem to be more substantial than
motion pictures that irt with real art.
Te cinematic technical premises and aesthetic ideas (to use Ador-
no/Eislers code) are absolutely and hopelessly incompatible. Cinema
will not become auratic by irting with art (music included). Te only
forms of aura it can hope for are degenerated forms of aura, in which
the spell of the here and now is technically manipulated. (CF, 72) Ben-
jamin is mentioned in this context as advocating (with reference to Franz
Werfel) the potential of the cinema to transgress reality due to its unique
capacity for expressing the realm of the fairy tale, the miraculous and the
supernatural with natural means and incomparable power. For Adorno/
Eisler, such would-be auratic cinema is incompatible with the very no-
tion of technical reproducibility, and with the factual, prosaic nature of
the medium. (CF, 73).
And so, Adorno was able to conclude again in 1966, famously and
acerbically, a year before the republication of CF (coauthorship now ac-
knowledged):
How nice it would be if, under the present circumstances, one could
claim that the less lms appear to be works of art, the more they would
be just that. One is especially drawn to this conclusion in reaction
to those snobbish psychological class-A pictures which the Culture
Industry forces itself to make for the sake of cultural legitimation.
Even so, one must guard against taking such optimism too far: the
standardized Westerns and thrillers to say nothing of the products
of German humor and the patriotic tear-jerkers (Heimatschnulze) are
even worse than the oicial hits. In integrated society one cannot even
depend on the dregs.
23
Te gap between this rather fail-safe, overkill observation, and Adornos
very idea of what music is and does, is absolute and unbridgeable. Films
belong to the universe of social wrongs and soft manipulation, and are
23 Adorno, Transparencies on Film (fn. 19), 205.
iia ooviv
171
instrumental to the no-exit airmativity of commodication, including
the inevitable absorption into the commodications netting and ration-
ale of both true transgressions and false displays of authenticity. Music,
to put it blatantly, is redemption from what lms are and from what lms
represent and perpetuate. I can hardly nd a more emphatic contrast to
Adornos words on cinema, and a more commanding expression of what
music was for him, than an excerpt from his account of a certain mo-
ment in Gustav Mahlers rst symphony: Fr ein paar Sekunden whnt
die Symphonie, es sei wirklich geworden, was ngstlich und verlangend
ein Leben lang der Blick von der Erde am Himmel erhote.
24
[For a
few seconds, the symphony seems to make true what one has anxiously
desired throughout ones life, raising the eyes up to heaven. Translation
mine.] For him, all music keeps alive the promise metaphysical, politi-
cal, but most of all personal that it shall not be so it must not be so,
namely, the promise of the non-xity of the given. Music is the heart and
core of non-identitarian philosophy, and the guardian of subjecthood
itself. When all is said and done, its praxis, or at least its proven practica-
bility in lms whether composed as such, or worse still, as segments of
auratic tradition shifted and interpolated into lmic narration entails
a dissonance that, in the nal balance, proves to be intolerable for this
paradigmatic philosopher of dissonance.
*
In todays perspective, for contemporary readers CF retains some endur-
ing and highly pertinent insights about the cinema. Tese transcend or
at least are not simply reducible to the works overt ambition. I believe
that no reassessment of CF may overlook these groping intuitions. Es-
pecially outstanding among such incipient, partially developed ideas is
Adorno/Eislers assertion that the cinema was and remains silent by its
nature: it is a pantomime, something akin to ballet. It is supposed
to be intrinsically so: talking motion pictures are mute. (CF, 76) Tis
is not a neutral judgment. Te cinema metamorphoses human aairs,
whose privileged habitat is language, into a at surface of virtuality. Tey
become a purely specular, voiceless presentness, a reied visuality. For the
authors, this is the nature of the lmic project per se. (Needless to say, this
observation has nothing to do with the historical circumstances of the
sound-strip techniques up to the time of CF s publication.) Terefore,
24 Teodor W. Adorno, Eine musikalische Physiognomie, Frankfurt/Main
1963, 11.
172
the endeavor to introduce spoken language into lms merely enhances
this mediums most profound, most uncanny emptiness, regardless of its
apparent pretension to lifelike verisimilitudes: namely, the lacuna of the
human subject. Strikingly, it turns out that for Adorno/Eisler this den-
ing energy of the cinema is not due as one might expect to the partic-
ularities of cinema production and cinema reception under the regime of
the culture industry. Rather, the talking pictures are mute because the
medium itself is alien to the notion of discourse. In a sentence reminis-
cent of the Brechtian argument for the political potential of the theater as
opposed to the cinema, the authors state that the characters in [motion
pictures] are not speaking people, but speaking eigies, endowed with all
the features of the pictorial, the photographic two-dimensionality, the
lack of spatial depth. (CF, 76) Hence, the better the illusionist tech-
nique, the less persuasive and the more troubling the impression.
Filmic perception itself, to Adorno/Eislers mind, involves a constitutive
schism, considering that the photographed bodiless mouths moving
sights perceived as encoded images seem to emit sounds that are not
images of voice. (Te implied incompatibility transcends, of course,
the presumed spectators psychology of perception. Again, only inside the
historical eld of essentialist aesthetics can such a split between encoded
image and would-be real-life sound be considered as a transgression.)
To an innocent reader, Adorno/Eislers argument might suggest more
than a hint of puerile ignorance of what medium-dependent persuasive-
ness is all about to begin with. However, this is obviously quite irrelevant
to the context of CF. For the coauthors, the singular character of that
which they designate as the cinematic muteness generates no less than
an unsettling experience of threatened selfhood. At stake, ultimately, are
not aesthetic considerations of coherence or persuasiveness, but oppres-
sion versus dignity. And therefore, whereas before Modernity music was
sometimes enacted as witness to the boundaries of language; and from
early Modernity on, it was entreated to testify to the imminent decay
of language in lms music assumes a third dimension vis--vis lan-
guage. From the very beginning it was introduced into lms, according
to Adorno/Eislers uncommon percept, to cover the uncanny noise of
absent subjects. It functions like a whistling in the dark for the sake
of people [who] experience themselves as creatures of the same kind, as
being threatened by muteness. (CF, 75) Music exorcises the fear and
absorbs the spectators shock. (Ibid.)
From this point of view, that Adorno a priori rejects the idea and prod-
ucts of would-be art cinema may now be interpreted in terms that are
true to his deepest intuitions. However, they are not in line with his own
iia ooviv
173
arguments as they were presented above. Te cinema, in Adorno/Eislers
view, now appears as an abstract, stylized pattern of xed modules: it is
a ritualized, medium-dependent code without any key or referrentiality,
which is inevitably divorced from discourse. If, as they believe, cinema
is wholly about the primacy of gesture, then it is acutely innocent: it
tells a closed-circuit story about its own rituals of forms. It cannot, and
should not even try to, convey the idea and practice of language. Filmic
triteness attains the force of a secret.
Cinema is but a weird pageant of ghosts and gesticulating masks, but
it is precisely as such that it no longer can be taken for a documentary,
as the coauthors have claimed in a strictly pejorative sense (CF, 8). From
this angle, Adornos rejection of artistic cinema acquires a dimension of
a particular lm-literacy that has little to do with personal idiosyncrasies.
It is not through its populist shortcomings, but as a formalistic ritual
that the cinema signals self-loss via its overwhelming power to obliter-
ate the living opacity of all otherness, transformed into the iconicity of
gesture. In this regard, the signicance of Adornos (although perhaps not
Eislers) approach to cinema within his philosophical anthropology be-
comes most revealing. For at issue, ultimately, is the idea of picture rather
than the practice of motion pictures; the hubris of visual presentness and
its ensuing ethical evil closure, still life, stilled lives.

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