Christine
I suppose my thoughts might not relate to praxis oriented contexts - unless
it is artistic practice.
Few philosophers have impressed me more than Adorno. Minima Moralia,
Negative Dialectics and his Aesthetic Theory are among my favourite books.
Yet when it comes to Adorno and cinema?? When I first read your question I
thought ideas about Adorno as as way into films are something like ideas
about using a grand piano as a way into your locked car.
Then I thought more about it and it occured to me that it is not Adorno as a
mass culture critic that seems as valuable to me as Adorno on other things.
Adorno on nature as a way into THIN RED LINE or STROMBOLI. Adorno on
silliness in art as a way into comedy. On spontaneity vs enduring love as a
way into what Stanley Cavell called those comedies of remarriage (THE AWFUL
TRUTH, PHILADELPHIA STORY, etc). On the meaning of the historic specifity of
an artwork as a way into NOTORIOUS. On Hegel's concept of experience in
Gilian Armstrongs LITTLE WOMEN. (I wrote an essay on this once, and although
I dont think I mentioned A., his thought was very important to it.)
And Adorno is very good on art in that particular (and enduring) high
Modernist sense of difficult art. So Adorno on the hypermelodic character of
atonal music provides a way of thinking about the hypernarrative of many
difficult films. Often these films are thought of as boring, repetitive,
nothing-happens or minimalist, when they are just too rich a narrative
string to be easily sorted. There is so much information that casual
observation can only see noise. I think they are much more narrative driven
than supposedly plot driven or narrative driven action, suspense or thriller
works. I am thinking for example of films by Claire Denis, the Dardennes
brothers, Resnais, Bresson, Ackerman, Wong Kar -Wai, many more.
A week or so ago I saw Dreyers GERTRUD for the first time. A treat. It would
fall into this narrative driven category too. It also recalled to me things
Adorno had said about the historical character of art and about its apparent
anachronistic character. Serge Daney, commenting on the apparently old
fashioned style of GERTRUD, writes of its terrifying modernity.
Ross
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