Lea Dovev
Film Music as Film Critique Adorno/Eisler Adorno/Eisler on an »Apocryphal Branch of Art«1 was, and perhaps still is, an unfortunate book. 2 Composing for the Films was, An outsider-classic in the field of film music theory, the work’s work’s 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 film readership, which may not be initially committed to the Adornian élan, 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 film hermeneutics, film production and film reception. Such a readership could certainly detect in this 1947 book a dated bias, even at the time of its publication. o o single out a characteristic example, Michel Chion, a major contributor to the discourse on music and sound in the cinema today, today, categorizes this work as having a »particular approach.« 3 Given Adorno/Eisler’s fundamental theses, in which their concrete analyses and critical propositions are grounded, this seems almost self-evident. But for f or years this book was also considered marginal in the frame work of Adorno’ Adorno’s œuvre within the philosopher’ philosopher’s own circle of presumed followers. I am afraid it still is.
1 »Te idea of history [is] not applicable to such an ›apocryphal ›apocr yphal branch of art‹.« Teodor W. Adorno/Hanns Eisler, Composing for the Films [1947] (hereinafter referred to as CF ), ), with a new introduction by Graham McCann, London, 1994, here: 49. 2 Te first manuscript of CF was was written in German by Adorno and Eisler between 1940 and 1944 in the U.S., sponsored by a Rockefeller grant. Te book was first published in English in 1947, authored by the composer Hanns Eisler only, without Adorno’s name. Eisler republished a modified version in German in 1949 under his name alone. Adorno published another modified, 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 cinéma, Paris Paris 1992, 214. Theodor W. Adorno - Philosoph des beschädigten Lebens © Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 2004
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It is an »uncomfortable and sometimes frustrating hybrid of a book,« confirms Graham McCann,4 who attributes this weakness to the coauthors’ deep-seated and lifelong differences, bearing upon the inevitably »troubled« nature of their relationship,5 and especially to the extent that Adorno’s critical philosophy concerning the culture industry (which, when all is said and done, McCann seems to have little taste for) overpowered Eisler’s practical mastery of the issues at hand.6 Conversely, yet in a parallel perspective, one of Adorno’s most knowledgeable and perceptive readers, Richard Leppert, has recently claimed (in his monumental English compilation of Adorno’s writings on music) that »Reading this book is somewhat frustrating compared to Adorno’s 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 character of a formulaic how-to book.« For Leppert, this is due to Eisler’s influence. In his brief, excellent presentation, Leppert attaches little significance to the pregnant tensions immanent in this work’s 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 musical 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 text’s overt predicament. In the following pages I envisage another point of view. I shall suggest considering this book’s quasi-neglected insights and commendations in the framework of past and present discourses on film within an eyecentered culture and its discontents. As such, its hour has come. Along these lines, it may be argued that CF is considerably more significant in Adorno’s work than it may seem. As the book’s strictures develop gradu4 Graham McCann, Introduction, CF, ix. 5 Ibid., xxvii and passim. 6 »oday, fifty 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 seriously.« Ibid., viii. McCann also urges his readers to realize that »it is extremely important that one places this critique [Culture Industry] in its proper historical context.« (ibid., xxiv). 7 Teodor W. Adorno, Essays on Music, Selected with Introduction, Commentary and Notes by Richard Leppert, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London 2002, 365. 8 Ibid. W. Adorno - Philosoph des beschädigten Lebens 158Theodor © Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 2004
ally toward a recognition of questions of degrees and viabilities, its undecided, 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 Horkheimer’s) 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 ime 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 profess his coauthorship in the initial publication may be grasped as more significant than a merely circumstantial attempt to keep clear of Eisler’s 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 afterthought 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 recording), and marketplace entertainment. Cinema has nothing to do with bourgeois (»individualistic«) literary or dramatic traditions. Tese two origins fully determined cinema’s 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. Theodor W. Adorno - Philosoph des beschädigten Lebens © Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 2004
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3. Like the entire culture industry, yet most conspicuously so, cinema »parasitically thrives on products of old individualistic age« ( CF , lii). Hence, any attempt to endow films with the negativity inherent in the pre-culture industry art – through absorption and adaptation – is aesthetically futile and politically affirmative, 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, f or »Speech presupposes man as self, rather than the primacy of gesture« ( CF , 77). 5. Vision and hearing constitute and reflect different modes of sub jecthood. Whereas vision is distancing, hearing is enveloping and communal. Te eye is »adapted to bourgeois rationality, conceiving reality as made up of separate things, commodities, objects that can be modified by practical activity« (CF , 20). Te ear is archaic, passive, and »not in keeping with present cultural anthropology«; it is »antithetical to the definiteness 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 signifier of tamed non-mediation: »irrationality dealt with rationally.« 7. Concomitantly, in films music signals the decay, limits or impotence of language. 8. »Te function of music in cinema is an extreme version of the general function of music under conditions of industrially controlled cultural consumption« (CF , 20). Music’s pretended aura of authenticity is thus doubly compromised in cinema. Its use consolidates the manipulative effectiveness 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 filmic (preposterous) visuality and cast doubts upon the apparent linkage of picture, sequence, narrative and meaning. Being a numinous limen of sense (especially to the layman), music is a privileged site of auto-reflexivity in a medium otherwise prone to superficial over-factuality. Film »claims to be photographed 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, fixed musical modules used routinely (and degradingly) in the assembly-line film industry. 11. At stake is oppression versus dignity, rather than good films versus bad ones. W. Adorno - Philosoph des beschädigten Lebens 160Theodor © Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 2004
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 elaborated 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/Eisler’s criticism of the accumulated know-how of the field – its day-to-day uses and abuses – and the ref orm they trace in detail, are grounded. Tis discourse has a dense climate of ideas for background, and a flourishing intellectual history for origins, namely, the history that shaped the ideological dimension of affinities, relative merits and flaws, and, more often than not, the incompatibilities of materials, means and procedures in art. Emphatically, these include reflections 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 stratification, were linked to value-laden tenets of art theory concerning medium-specificity. 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 field 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, finally, is meaning itself : modes and boundaries of transferability. At work is an essentialist aesthetic ideology, bearing upon the normativity of the medium’s nature in general, going back to Aristotle. Tis in turn leads to the ascetic rule of maximizing mediumspecific intelligence out of its defining limitations. Terefore, something cheap and platitudinous seems to hang upon the mixing of media. Te old Aristotelian inhibition regarding the metabasis of categories (ontological and epistemological) lives on. A universal presupposition regarding 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, Jerusalem 2003 (Hebrew). Theodor W. Adorno - Philosoph des beschädigten Lebens © Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 2004
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problemizes, the filmic auditory dimension – speech, noise and music: superfluous at worst, subversive at best. It is revealing that the filmic 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-essentialism, translated into the overt insistence that film 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 film? Generally speaking, the unanimous answer is negative. »o be sure, bad movies cannot get away without music […] but what we wish to determine is, if a film whose visual dialectic is solid, whose dramatic qualities are well affirmed […] does such a movie require music or not? Let us answer unhesitatingly: it can do without.«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 filler f or a film 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 film theoreticians dealing with this subject have drawn and developed.«14 Jaubert argued that music in films should not interact with the image by way of explicating the narrative. o avoid triviality – harmful to image and sound alike – it should be made to coalesce into a medium-specific, audio-visual rhythmicality. Tus, the real-time duration and the fictive time of the plot come to be played one against the other to form the specific temporality and time-awareness of filmic experience. In this, Jaubert codifies for all mass-audience film 11 Derogatory essentialist thematizations of music in the cinema must be differentiated 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 filmic situation. Tese, as Adorno/Eisler note with distaste, have become building blocks of accepted practice for a whole century). 12 Henri Colpi, Défence et illustration de la musique de film, Lyon 1961. 13 Maurice Jaubert, La musique dans le cinéma, in: Esprit (April 1936). 14 Christian Metz, Current Problems of Film Teory, in: Screen Reader 2 (1981), 38-85. W. Adorno - Philosoph des beschädigten Lebens 162Theodor © Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 2004
production to come, the lessons and bearings of the earliest praxis and theory of abstract and surrealist cinema. Pierre Schaeffer, in his three seminal essays on » L’élement non visuel au cinéma « (1946),15 sees the issue in similar terms: »Music has no importance whatsoever in films, and it is not necessary. Any music will do [n’importe quelle musique fera l’affaire ] […] music is a good girl. It is the ideally elastic material. With minimal care it will give the maximum.« What he has in mind is an acute shift from musique -illustration to musique-matériau. Tis is to be achieved by means of metaphoric counterpoint: masking appearances, optimizing effects of gaps and discrepancies (décalage ); playing with noise against musical articulation, and so on. Schaeffer is much more cautious about rhythm synchronization than Jaubert (or, for that matter, Eisenstein). Indeed, he advocates rhythmicformal 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-specificity of the cinematic medium. But, he observes with perspicacity, such a match is also likely to generate a comical or unreal effect 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 Schaeffer, again, is to be only the regulative idea of movement as such, against which music as non-pleonastic counterpoint can become musique-matériau: a distinct presentness – allusive, critical, ironic, reflexive. A generation later, Jean Mitry would develop Jaubert’s and Schaeffer’s ideas into a full-fledged theory of music in films as a signal of gaps and partial or insufficient visual data, and hence as a trigger for actively interpretative spectatorship. 16 Christian Metz’s comments on Mitry would enrich the discourse yet further. Te entire field resonates with discontent over eye-centered culture – so emphatic in multi-faceted philosophical, rather than narrowly cinematic, criticism of modernity itself. * Intriguingly, if CF ’s theses posited above (with the exception of the one regarding the potential of the new musical idioms) may seem at first 15 Pierre Schaeffer, L’élément non visuel au cinéma, in: Revue du cinéma 1, 2 and 3 (1946). 16 Jean Mitry, Esthétique et psychologie du cinéma, Paris 1963 (vol. ii, chapter 12: La parole et le son). Theodor W. Adorno - Philosoph des beschädigten Lebens © Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 2004
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glance to promise little regarding the prescriptive project at hand, Adorno/Eisler’s maxims – their do’s and don’t’s as far as the praxis of film music goes – turn out to reiterate or even prefigure (in principle as well as in detail) the commendations of the eminent avatars and codifiers of the field. From the early, rather value-neutral history traced by Kurt London 17 to the developed percepts of Maurice Jaubert or Pierre Schaeffer, all the way to the finely-threaded conceptual plenitude of Jean Mitry, a consistent voice is heard throughout the field, and it is at one with the Adornian/ Eisler endeavor, namely the pursuit of ways to optimize the interpolations of musical sound in films so as to thwart filmic 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 reflexivity 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 métier are actually set and promulgated within the boundaries of what may be termed a Materialgerechtigkeit theory (whether acknowledged under this title or not is of little difference). 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 different ways. Object-oriented and receptionoriented 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 capable of formulating guidelines for film music that correspond in detail to the logic of the culture industry critic, yet without recourse to Adorno/ Eisler’s philosophical habitat of political engagement, nor to the one or the other’s – mutatis mutandis – socially redemptive horizon of hope. Some instances in the history of film 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 antithetical juxtapositions and clashes of ambiguous, ironical, seemingly alien musical citations, inlays and associations. Such musical »riddles,« in fact, turned into the main hermeneutic thread within the filmic whole, requiring the spectator to have a quite solid knowledge of music (re17 Kurt London, Film Music [1936], New York 1970. W. Adorno - Philosoph des beschädigten Lebens 164Theodor © Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 2004
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 final editing. Tus, they obviously did not originate from any theoretical paradigm of non-pleonasms of the kind traced above, Adorno/Eisler’s CF included. Adorno, of course, had an ambivalent relationship with the temptations 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 philosopher’s aesthetic discourse in its totality, and especially so in his writings on music. Disparaged as relativism-prone and politically indifferent, yet constituting an ever abidingly relevant challenge, the claims of Materialgerechtigkeit theory constitute the tacit background of CF . Adorno’s 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 Eisler’s: »echnology opens up unlimited opportunities for art in the future, and even in the poorest motion pictures there are moments when such opportunities are strikingly apparent« (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 essentialist scarcity. * 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 fixity of all otherness as material and a-temporal, voiceless and identitarian givenness. It is instrumental to reification and appropriation. Te eye, say Adorno/Eisler, is actively selective, swift, sure, constitutive; it fixes 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 films is f aceless, universal, possessive and uninvolved. Hearing, on the other hand, is enveloping and open, temporal, objectless and historically communal. If vision is concerned with the presentness of things Theodor W. Adorno - Philosoph des beschädigten Lebens © Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 2004
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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 filmic 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 different modes of subjecthood immanent in vision versus hearing (and thus in the vision-bound product of culture as opposed to music), Adorno/Eisler write: »Roughly speaking, all music, including the most ›objective‹ and nonexpressive, belongs primarily to the sphere of subjective inwardness, whereas even the most spiritual painting is heavily burdened with unresolved objectivity. Motion-picture music, being at the mercy of this relationship, should attempt to make it productive, rather than to negate its confused identification.« ( CF , 17) Music, then, is called upon to redeem film. It conserves its force even when it becomes a filmic hybrid, when it is disintegrated and manipulated according to the logic of filmic narration. It can be made to serve this heroic project of refusal. CF is about the practicability and the urgent need of doing this. It means suspending the tragic halo of autonomous 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 getting rid of sonic anchors of identity-enhancement and narrational readability, such as, notoriously, leitmotif and melody. Te idioms of »New Music« can undermine the idea of banal, one-to-one, pinpointed expressivity. 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 f ar as the common film spectator is concerned, already subverts the illusion of fixed 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-sufficiency and assumed defensibility of individuals living in an oppressive world. Interrupted 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 – W. Adorno - Philosoph des beschädigten Lebens 166Theodor © Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 2004
floating, interrupted or nonexistent – the new idioms can help draw attention to sham certainties and to pseudo-wholes. In this, Adorno comes perilously close to Benjamin’s idea of how, from the ashes of lost aura due to technical reproduction, the progressive political gains of tomorrow may emerge. For an almost outlandish moment he seems ready to view films as tools of a negative aesthetic. Te differences 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 film spectatorship. Te very opening paragraph of CF implies a direct disallowance of Benjamin’s insights on film in this regard: it states right away, prior to any further qualifications, that the culture industry (and hence film) 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. o 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 affirm, the claim of film experience to express »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 necessarily entails a tacit criticism of Benjamin’s apparent innocence, but not of the latter’s 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 different 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 indicate an art expressing the masses, or even intended for the masses. In the second sense, Benjamin’s 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 film redeemed by music, as proclaimed by the authors of CF . * Theodor W. Adorno - Philosoph des beschädigten Lebens © Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 2004
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»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 f or 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 medium, 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 »ransparencies on Film« published in Die Zeit.19 Te text clearly reflects his feeling of being publicly summoned to review his prevalent position on films, in the face of the growing aspirations of contemporary cinéma d’auteur, and the accompanying proliferation of refined theoretical thought, mainly outside the American assembly-line studio system. Adorno’s starting point was Volker Schlöndorff’s Der junge örless (1965-66), which retained whole segments of Robert Musil’s text intact, incorporated into the dialogue. He considered the failure of the film, as he saw it, to be symptomatic. In Adorno’s judgment, Musil’s text was not adaptable to cinema because it uses a » recherché false note of rationalization throughout« and thus cannot »function simply as any other, though sensibly better, filmic dialogue.« 20 But the issue at hand, of course, is not Musil’s shortcomings in the role of an 18 I am grateful to Detlev Claussen for having enlightened me about Adorno’s early and continuing movie-going habit and his love for the cinema. At the el Aviv Adorno conference (November 2003) documented in this volume, Claussen claimed that Adorno’s commentators were wrong about the philosopher’s supposed relative film-illiteracy, and even more so about his aversion to the medium. Adorno’s 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-specific grade B movies – musical comedies, westerns, etc. (see, e.g., CF , 16, and likewise, »ransparencies on Film« [fn. 19]). He loathed »pretentious, grade A films.« But to my mind, if, and how, he was capable of recognizing »non-pretentious« grade A films at all, is another matter. And if, and how, his taste for the B grade acted for or against his grasp of the medium’s 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: ransparencies on Film, in: New German Critique 24-25 (Fall/Winter 1981), 199. 20 Ibid., 200. W. Adorno - Philosoph des beschädigten Lebens 168Theodor © Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 2004
imagined scriptwriter. Adorno argued that the real problem was that of (temporal and corrigible?) immaturity: »the artistic difference 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 cinematographer’s 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 mediumspecificity convictions of CF regarding the origins – and hence the future destiny – of cinema . But even in 1966 Adorno could hardly be considered optimistic in this regard. Te article, I am afraid, shows him to be lacking in acute film 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 problems of what was then discussed routinely as new cinema – an intellectual, psychological, theological and essentially non-American pursuit. His idea of such a successful lesson was no less then Maurizio Kagel’s Antithèse (a 1965 television film for a single performer with electronic and everyday sounds). In this, let me add briefly, 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 offer tendentiously abstract samples of art cinema – paradigmatic, rare and extraordinary – as proof of the potential of high music to transcend the filmic medium and emerge a winner. For that matter, the Kagel example functions rather like another standby in the field: say, René Clair’s short film Entre’acte (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 difficulty, repeatedly dodged and crisscrossed the subject of art cinema in their book in a kind of cat’s-cradle zigzag. Tey advanced, retracted, doubted, tried various starting points, and doubted again. Here, for example, is a revealing passage: »Te insurmountable heterogeneity of these media [pictures, words and music in films] furthers from the outside the liquidation of ro21 Ibid. 22 Ibid., 202 f. Theodor W. Adorno - Philosoph des beschädigten Lebens © Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 2004
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manticism which is an intrinsic historical tendency within each art. Te alienation of the media from each other reflects a society alienated from itself […] Terefore the aesthetic divergence of the media is potentially a legitimate means of expression, not merely a regrettable deficiency that has to be concealed as well as possible.« ( CF , 74) Teir conclusion, which follows immediately thereafter, is rather incoherent. For the coauthors say: »And this is perhaps the fundamental reason why many light-entertainment pictures that fall f ar below the pretentious standards of the usual movie seem to be more substantial than motion pictures that flirt with real art.« Te cinematic »technical premises« and »aesthetic ideas« (to use Adorno/Eisler’s code) are absolutely and hopelessly incompatible. Cinema will not become auratic by »flirting« 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 notion 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 acknowledged): »How nice it would be if, under the present circumstances, one could claim that the less films 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 official hits. In integrated society one cannot even depend on the dregs.«23 Te gap between this rather fail-safe, overkill observation, and Adorno’s 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, ransparencies on Film (fn. 19), 205. W. Adorno - Philosoph des beschädigten Lebens 170Theodor © Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 2004
instrumental to the no-exit affirmativity of commodification, including the inevitable absorption into the commodification’s netting and rationale of both true transgressions and false displays of authenticity. Music, to put it blatantly, is redemption from what films are and from what films represent and perpetuate. I can hardly find a more emphatic contrast to Adorno’s words on cinema, and a more commanding expression of what music was for him, than an excerpt from his account of a certain moment in Gustav Mahler’s first symphony: »Für ein paar Sekunden wähnt die Symphonie, es sei wirklich geworden, was ängstlich und verlangend ein Leben lang der Blick von der Erde am Himmel erhoffte.« 24 [»For a few seconds, the symphony seems to make true what one has anxiously desired throughout one’s life, raising the eyes up to heaven.« ranslation mine.] For him, all music keeps alive the promise – metaphysical, political, but most of all personal – that »it shall not be so – it must not be so,« namely, the promise of the non-fixity 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 practicability in films – whether composed as such, or worse still, as segments of auratic tradition shifted and interpolated into filmic narration – entails a dissonance that, in the final balance, proves to be intolerable for this paradigmatic philosopher of dissonance. * In today’s perspective, for contemporary readers CF retains some enduring and highly pertinent insights about the cinema. Tese transcend – or at least are not simply reducible to – the work’s overt ambition. I believe that no reassessment of CF may overlook these groping intuitions. Especially outstanding among such incipient, partially developed ideas is Adorno/Eisler’s 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 affairs, whose privileged habitat is language, into a flat surface of virtuality. Tey become a purely specular, voiceless presentness, a reified visuality. For the authors, this is the nature of the filmic 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. Theodor W. Adorno - Philosoph des beschädigten Lebens © Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 2004
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the endeavor to introduce spoken language into films merely enhances this medium’s 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 defining energy of the cinema is not due – as one might expect – to the particularities 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 reminiscent 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 effigies, endowed with all the features of the pictorial, the photographic two-dimensionality, the lack of spatial depth.« ( CF , 76) Hence, the better the illusionist technique, the less persuasive – and the more troubling – the impression. Filmic perception itself, to Adorno/Eisler’s 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 spectator’s psychology of perception. Again, only inside the historical field of essentialist aesthetics can such a split between encoded image and would-be real-life sound be considered as a transgression.) o an innocent reader, Adorno/Eisler’s argument might suggest more than a hint of puerile ignorance of what medium-dependent persuasiveness 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 self hood. At stake, ultimately, are not aesthetic considerations of coherence or persuasiveness, but oppression 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 films music assumes a third dimension vis-à-vis language. From the very beginning it was introduced into films, according to Adorno/Eisler’s 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 spectator’s shock.« (Ibid.) From this point of view, that Adorno a priori rejects the idea and products 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 W. Adorno - Philosoph des beschädigten Lebens 172Theodor © Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 2004
arguments as they were presented above. Te cinema, in Adorno/Eisler’s view, now appears as an abstract, stylized pattern of fixed 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 f or a »documentary,« as the coauthors have claimed in a strictly pejorative sense ( CF , 8). From this angle, Adorno’s rejection of »artistic« cinema acquires a dimension of a particular film-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 obliterate the living opacity of all otherness, transformed into the iconicity of gesture. In this regard, the significance of Adorno’s (although perhaps not Eisler’s) approach to cinema within his philosophical anthropology becomes 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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