Broken glass by the road: Adorno and a cinema of negativity

Abstract

German philosopher, musicologist, and leading light of the Frankfurt School for Social Research, Theodor W. Adorno (1903-69) has been frequently ignored or cast as a villain within university Film Studies.1 This is largely due to the heavy historical baggage of Dialectic of Enlightenment, the seminal book he co-authored with Max Horkheimer (first published in 1944), which was highly influential in Humanities departments until backlash in the 1980s and 1990s. Mounting an analysis via Greek mythology of Western modernity to find it has betrayed the Enlightenment’s dual promises of reason and freedom, this central Frankfurt School work casts cinema as a principal star of ‘the culture industry’ - Horkheimer and Adorno’s famous phrase describing mass culture propagated by the socio-economic and political interests of modern capitalism.2’[T]he regression of enlightenment to ideology’, we read in the early pages, ‘finds its typical expression in cinema and radio’ (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1979, p.xvi), fuelled by a model of heavily delimited ‘individuality’ characteristic of the culture industry’s ‘administered life’ (ibid., p.3). This seemingly blanket critique of film and mass media, given detailed form in Dialectic of Enlightenment’s most discussed and debated chapter ‘The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception’, has for a long time been widely dismissed as ‘elitist’.