Hamish Ford

Broken Glass by the Road: Adorno and a Cinema of Negativity

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’.

The New World

This final chapter extends Part II’s discussion of time’s ontological impact in 1960s modernist European cinema through a more formally detailed and philosophically conclusive account of L’eclisse and Last Year in Marienbad. It begins by examining the gaze resulting from temporal stretching and ellipses, then moves to delineate the spatial and perceptual ingredients of an interior crisis at the epicentre of which lies time. This is followed by a close analysis of the films’ rendering of a space-time potentially characterised by the post-human (which is in fact anything but an escape from human-forged space) and the new, yet also the always present alien world that may lie in wait. The chapter then pulls together Part II’s philosophical account of temporality in seeking to better define the ambiguous consequences of the time-image for the subject, before concluding with a close-up on the time-image’s affect on and ultimate challenges to thought.

Cinema’s Ontological Challenge

In very different ways, Persona and Two or Three Things I Know About Her render and confront the ontological violence of both cinema and modernity — that of the films’ contemporary real but also, in refractory fashion, the much ‘later’ stage at which we watch them today. Chapter 1 sets out to historically, philosophically, and filmically put into context cinema’s potential foregrounding of negativity through these two select case studies. Thereafter, Chapter 2 can develop a more direct analysis of exactly how all this plays out through the formal seams of these two films, which from five decades later appear so exemplary of post-war cinema’s modernist peak.

The return of 1960s modernist cinema

ABSTRACT This article concerns the complex nature of post-war European film modernisms historicity. According to András Bálint Kovács, this cinema rose in an arc starting from the mid-1950s, peaking in the 1960s, and slowly petering out by 1980. At its best such historicizing produces precise contextual detailing, rather than romantic-hermetic affirmation or subsequent backlash dismissal, in the process creating room for new accounts of films and filmmakers beyond their role in the heated politics of then-contemporary critical taste and the competitive linear regime of vanguard innovation. But we also need to look closely at the peculiarities of this particular modernist cinemas apparent ‘past-ness’ as revealing crucial elements of modernisms perennial (if variously contested or disavowed) power, challenge and attraction. This article explores the uncanny, untimely return of such cinemas 1960s apogee, embedded in a very real past while also emerging from virtual futures, as it complicates anew our unstable present.