Abstract

The historical and political myopia of much contemporary philosophical writing on film results, so the opening polemic, from its unwillingness to interrogate its own cinematic fascination. This is not true, however, of the often equally philosophical work referred to as "film theory." In a series of exemplary readings of writings on the mass media by Georg Lukacs, Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno --each accompanied by a translation of a relevant primary text--the dissertation substantiates the latter claim through a revisionist interpretation of the Frankfurt School's media theory which is presented as a careful dialectical analysis of technology as inscription. ;The introductory essay explores the distinction between "philosophy of film" and "film theory," arguing that the former focuses only on illusionistic content while the latter interrogates the very conditions of that illusion . One of the earliest examples of such critical "film theory" can be found in Lukacs' 1913 essay on the aesthetics of cinema. This text, situated in Chapter 1 within the context of Lukacs' later writings on cinema, is presented as an exemplary instance of a dialectical reading of cinematic technology. Chapter 2 then traces the move towards film during the Weimar era in the work of Kracauer and Benjamin, situating it within their theories of history, experience, perception and cultural criticism. This provides the context for a reexamination of Adorno's much misunderstood reading of the mass media which, it is argued, can only be grasped when refracted through his writings about the artistic domain in which he was most well versed and highly trained: music. A reading of Adorno's ideological analysis of film music and of his reflections on the gramophone reveals that his response to technology cannot be simply reduced to a Luddite and/or mandarin rejection. Rather, Adorno's is also a dialectical interpretation that sees redemptive possibilities in the unavoidable reification of technological inscription. For Adorno--as for Lukacs, Kracauer and Benjamin--so the thesis concludes, the artwork in the age of its technological reproducibility must be grasped simultaneously as a manifestation of alienation and as a cipher of utopia