Miraim Hansen, in her examination of Adorno through the lens of finding a comprehensive theoretical approach to film aesthetics, attempts to contextualize rather than explicitly argue for Adorno as film theoretician. In her chapter titled The Question of Film Aesthetics which in itself is apart of a larger treatment of media theory in theoretical and historical overlap titled Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno, Hansen can be understood mainly as attempting a mediation of Adorno and his usually interdisciplinary examination of media effects and a conception of Adorno as film theorist. Hansen, moving across various authors, medium analyses, and historical periods, works to examine and speculate on how the broad range of media theorists can be put into an understanding of cinematic theory and vice-versa. Within the opening of the chapter, Hansen starts by defending Adorno as important to cinema aesthetics in relation to his general theses on the culture industry (207). The culture industry being the amalgamation of society, capitalism, and the effect of the ‘mass’ on the production of art. Adorno’s contributions to Film aesthetics then, for Hansen, consists of Adorno’s examinations of the culture industry and mass culture as detrimental to the positive processes of art, and film factoring into that discourse by providing a potential for challenging the culture industry by utilizing the medium’s industrial and aesthetic relationship (208). For Hansen, Adorno can be understood as operating in tandem with the development of cinema as a medium, with Hansen contextualizing and historicizing Adorno’s various publications and collaborations alongside his interactions with Hollywood producers, Young German Cinema, and his various allusions (explicit or implicit) to Cinema throughout his career from 1925-1966 (208-210). Hansen finalizes her introduction with a generalized relationship to Adorno as constructing a solid theoretical base of cinema aesthetic. That base consisting of Adorno’s theories on cinema as aesthetically connected to writing and his having informed preferences connected to cinema as attempting to escape its systemically organized and sustained relationship to indexical reality. This subsequently serves as the beginning of Hansen’s argumentation for Adorno as deliberately constructing a cinematic aesthetic theory and becomes the theoretic base that she will return to later on. To begin to understand Hansen’s envisioning of Adorno’s film aesthetic theory (which encapsulates a myriad of separate concepts, history and authors spread across Adorno’s publications and general career and reputation), we must begin with an outline summarization of the segmented chapter and Hansen’s core arguments that contextualize Adorno within cinematic or general media theory history or speculate on Adorno’s potential theoretical base for cinema theory.

Hansen begins her argumentation in this sequence by approximating Adorno’s conceptions of the base media aesthetics that characterize art (and by extension the subjective-organic) and its relationship to technology within a systemically altered and corrupted environment that modernity has influenced via the culture industry. Hansen summarizes that the artist for Adorno, as he can be understood as operating in tandem with conceptions of “technique” (a fluid term that is used to identify levels of artistic/extra-artistic mastery over environment/nature/artistic production(211)) and technology (which operates to obscure the relationship to reality by its historic disruption of the production of art as separate from practical production (212)) must contest with the capitalist system of industrial production in the creation of his art. Hansen isolates Adorno’s quote that ““Art is Modern when, by its mode of experience and as the expression of the crisis of experience, it absorbs what industrialization has called forth under the given relations of production'' (AT 34; AT 57)”(214) and by extension that serves to help construct Hansen’s understanding of Adorno’s goals for art as connected to the artist working to provide a new subjectivity using the concepts of “experience” and a “world of images” (213). Hansen continues by arguing that Adorno desires a negotiation of subjectivity and technology as it relates to cinematic form that uses the subjective “experience” and the industrial-technological production of the “world of images” to formulate a form that disrupts the culture industry. This collaboration, argues Hansen, is achieved through a practice proposed by Adorno and Eisler for using the technological developments in recorded sound and the production of images specific to film to disrupt the synthesis of both into a naturalized relationship to art and reality (216). Hansen summarizes that Adorno and Eisler (within their joint publication Composing for Films) want film to avoid naturalizing and synthesizing sound and image into a place where neither are actively acknowledged or consciously present within the subjectivity of the spectator. The aesthetic relationship to technique and technology for Hansen’s envisioning of Adorno and Eisler is that technique must operate to use technology to undermine the industrial-ideological processes that characterize its production. Cinema must aesthetically operate with music on a level of representing reality that reproduces a subjective experience divorced from the “naturalizing” (217) effect of the photographic image. Cinema must, for Hansen’s augment of Adorno, work to de-emphasize the mimetic ambition of the ideologic-technology by representing “everyday reality” (217) with an aesthetic disjuncture that will serve to deconstruct the stream of images that makes up the culture industry. Effectively, Hansen is arguing that Adorno desires the cinematic to affect subjective relationships to the world by disrupting them through technology.

This segment, marks the beginning of Hansen’s examination of Adorno aiming for potential cinematic aesthetics in tandem with his analysis of other mediums, namely music and how cinema is separate in its operation. Adorno’s conception of music, Hansen outlines, although sometimes contradictory in his ambitions concerning improvisation (219) first serves as a useful comparison by which methods of creating the above mentioned disjunction can be achieved within cinema. Improvisation and the effects of avoiding notions of perfection (218) serving to provide an identifying factor for how cinematic aesthetics rebelling against the culture industry might be achieved. By looking at the means of mimetic representation through technique, and the kind of things that occupy cinematic diegetic spaces, Hansen outlines how Adorno conceives of film as having a direct connection with not only the broad mimetic ‘realism’ of the photographic but also the representative of the socio-political as well and that this is something that must be overcome/utilized if the culture industry is to be attacked in film (220). The characteristic of cinema in representing itself as an extension of reality with the goal of avoiding subjective meaning becomes a goal for Hansen’s conception of Adorno’s aesthetics (221). However, the intentionality to represent the sociological aspects of reality while still relying on notions of profit in its production become the central problem for how the naturalization effect happens in cinema aesthetics. Effectively, the cinematic must avoid ‘representation’ of the subjective, but still effectively provide material for the subjective experience of things in order to expand the world of art. Film shouldn’t try to represent a subjective perception of a landscape, but an mimetic-technological direct representation of a landscape by which the audience can derive their own subjective experience while still not appropriating the image as having a relationship to the real. Adorno’s mentions of montage then serve to be used as an example by which we (through Hansen’s structuring of Adorno’s quotations) can approximate Adorno’s goal for cinema through a familiar cinema-specific aesthetic construction and how Adorno praises and is unsatisfied with that construction and how we might relate it to the traditional movements of art. Hansen summarizes this relationship thusly: “In Adorno's aesthetic genealogy, montage emerged as an antithesis to all art charged with atmosphere (Stimmung), in particular impressionism. Impressionism sought to assimilate objects-"primarily drawn from the sphere of technological civilization or its amalgams with nature"-by dissolving them "into their smallest elements in order to synthesize them gaplessly into the dynamic continuum" (A T IS4-ss). In such subjectification of objective reality, the attempt to "aesthetically redeem the alienated and heterogeneous qua replica'' in the end relapsed into romanticism.” (222). In this passage we can see the methodology that Hansen uses to put Adorno in conversation with cinematic practices and how the criticism of the contemporary cinematic aesthetics dissatisfied Adorno. Effectively, Hansen is outlining that Adorno considered montage as only briefly enunciating the discourse between the technologically produced image of the film, the desire for a disgust representation of the world, and the capitalist systems that encapsulate their production. Montage only operated effectively in outlining the capacity for a dissect relationship to space through harshly contrasting images, but by its stylization in dissolving the mimetic, only resulted in a stylized experiment that wasn’t sustainable for a new subjectivized reality. For Adorno, as Hansen explains o conclude the chapter, montage doesn't achieve the perfect aesthetic model by which film can work against the culture industry because its unable to effectively communicate the mimetic because its caught up too much with the disrupting the psychological (and thereby representing the subjective) instead of providing the contrasting “images”, arranged in sequence to provoke an interiority (224) that characterize other arts (such as writing) but can be perfected in their mimetic aims and technological processes to create the aforementioned new subjectivity within the modern art world.

Hansen begins this sequence by outlining the following in preparation for her examination of writing in relation to cinema for Adorno: “Adorno's insistence that artworks are "imageless images [bilderlose Bilder] ;' images that are not replicas or representations of something in the sense of iconic resemblance (AT 283, 287), is founded on the view that such representational duplication is in the strict sense impossible. The problem is that it robs that which "appears" in nature of its "being-in-itself;' which is what we seek in the experience of nature (AT 67).” (224) this proves crucial later on to our conception of Adorno in relation to ‘nature’ as concept and its relationship to beauty as a systemically produced ‘tradition’ that doesn’t have an intimate relationship with reality that cinema could produce with infinite effectiveness, but as it extends to the concerns of this chapter, (the construction of images in the cinematic medium and the aesthetic effects of writing that could be appropriated into a cinematic aesthetic), it needs some summarization. Effectively, Hansen is arguing for Adorno’s conception of the base artistic construction of images as stemming from an interaction with the notion of representation, and what that means for a relationship to reality. As previously outlined in preceding segments, Adorno for Hansen desires within cinema an interaction with reality that doesn’t undermine a relationship to the real. The ‘real’ in this case being supplanted for the term ‘nature’, which by Hansen’s historicizing we can approximate as a kind of lost engagement with the past as provoked by modernity. Nature, effectively becomes a term that no longer exists “in-itself” but is subjugated to being a subjectively represented idea within art. Yet, how does this relate to writing as a formal concern of cinema? Hansen continues by outlining the other mediums by which Adorno explains his conception of writing as a aesthetic model that becomes embodied by different mediums through technological processes. Namely, the gramophone record and how Adorno conceptualized the process of the direct index that the record represents as a triumph in the goal of avoiding a fall representative relationship to reality but still having that connection with representation outside of artist subjectivity (225). Writing as an extension of all art becomes a central theme for Hansen’s examinations of the ‘indexical writing’ of reality upon the representational without subjective mediation. Utilizing models of seismographic theories, and the hieroglyphic nature of art as index (226), Hansen arrives back to the aesthetics of film by attempting to approximate a direct line of thought from Adorno concerning writing into film. The “language of images” (227) represented by this hieroglyphic mode of thought becomes the base by which Hansen approximates Adorno’s cinematic thought process. The hieroglyphs are likened to processes of mummification which prove familiar for an examination of film aesthetic and general technological theory through André Bazin later on (238), but in relation to writing, Hansen argues for Adorno as being motivated by an understanding o the mimetic processes of writing as connected within the image with commodity through the culture industry. Specifically, that the cinematic within television connotes the signified product or sociological trend with the consumer by virtue of its direct relationship with naturalizing reality. “Given the universality of the commodity and of advertisement in the culture industry, the image of an animated, speaking human being merely naturalizes that condition; it functions as a mask that captures everything living about the human face, especially laughter” (228). This has the effect of a “spell” (228) for Hansen’s methodology of understanding Adorno, and subsequently impacts the viewer into a state of no longer engaging with what is truly real and has a direct relationship to reality but instead a dead production of reality abstracted from the present. The mimetic relationship only serves to sensationalize what otherwise is bland and connected to the broad socio-political issues created by the culture industry. Writing then, through television becomes an possible extension of the processes of capitalism and attempts to disrupt the conscious interiority that would provoke an actual engagement with the represented reality. As it relates to the cinematic, the cinematic produces a process of writing interiority that becomes an “innate faculty” (229). That the spectator, by watching enough films, makes the cinematic processes of engaging with reality engrained within their own isolated perceptions of reality (229). Effectively processing the interior world as a film, which seems understandable considering the processes previously mentioned in preceding chapters regarding the dream-like flow of images (224). The interiority of the spectator then, in summary of this sequence can be understood as being affected by a negative approach to writing within cinematic aesthetics. That, for Hansen, Adorno is attempting to argue implicitly that the empirical processes of cinema being created by the index of reality can have the negative consequence of sustaining the culture industry by naturalizing the processes of cinema so well, that the natural interiority of the individual is destroyed in favour of accepting the world as an extension of the image, and not the other way around. The indexical image then, through processes of writing, must avoid a naturalizing of commodity and society and instead formulate a form of writing antagonistic to the easy consumption of image without disjuncture.

This chapter begins from previous notions of the natural as conceived as a marginalized concept within modernity. Hansen begins by arguing that the “experience of nature” (230) through the processes of traditional modes of aesthetics, becomes historical in nature and translates into conceptions of mastery and devastation that don't necessarily translate into the direct subjective experience of nature as it occurs in reality. That, in its operation as a traditional term, it transitions into modernity with the effect of marginalizing any direct relationship with nature and instead attempting to profit from nature as a com modifiable entity within the realm of artistic representation. What follows is one of the most explicit moments in Hansens chapter in which she states Adorno’s theoretical base in relation to this concept:

“Adorno's understanding of film in terms of natural beauty is elucidated by his critique of the "vulgar antithesis of technology and nature" implied by Rousseauian calls for the return to nature. The fallacy of this antithesis, he argues, "is obvious in the fact that precisely nature that has not been pacified by human cultivation, nature over which no human hand has passed-alpine moraines and taluses-resembles those mountains of industrial debris from which the socially accepted aesthetic need for nature flees" (AT 68; AT 106-7). There is a complex argument here. The terror inspired by untamed nature lends natural beauty an archaic, mythical ambiguity that makes it border on the sublime; at the same time, untamed nature's resemblance to modern industrial wasteland places it within the history of nature's subjection.” (230)

The ‘Natural’ then, for Hansen’s Adorno, becomes yet another empirical reality subjugated underneath the processes of the culture industry, capitalism, and by extension modernity. The intimate experience of nature becomes a product by which the culture industry can establish itself as attempting to alleviate the processes it represents in modernity, the industrial waste motivates an escape into the ‘natural’ and by extension recreates itself through this notion of separation. The relationship to film for Adorno then, is yet to be explored by Hansen. Hansen argues, that in the indexical production of the world, and through the true immediacy that Adorno values within modern art, the non-representational embodiment of the worked through the lack of artistic mediation becomes the central achievement that cinema possesses to explore indexical reality. The “dialectic of natural beauty and art beauty” then, disrupted by Kant (231) becomes another aesthetic goal for cinema for Adorno, and by extension of Hansen’s reasoning can be achieved through the non-representational image. “Rather than a mere source of inspiration or object of contemplation, natural beauty provides a model for art in its elusive appearance and indeterminateness. For Adorno, the aporia of natural beauty-its flashing-up only to disappear before the effort to transfix it, make it graspable-names the aporia of aesthetics as a whole.” (232). The cinematic natural becomes for Hansen’s Adorno, a non-representational, inspiring image that traditional art has striven for, but due to its mediation through subjectivity has never achieved to its full effectiveness (though the awakening of the viewer becomes the central virtue of Adorno’s subjectively mediated art natural). For Adorno, the interior subjective experience becomes tied instead to the individual “beholder” (233). The aesthetic processes of the relationship to the natural ‘real’ and the art natural becomes foregrounded by Hansen in her clarification of Adorno’s priorities in interaction with then natural. The “auratic” effect of an artwork in approximating the real becomes one of the central methods by which Hansen summarizes Adorno as desiring the relationship to art as attempting to provide “speech” to the “muteness” of nature (234) and by extension inspire the individual beholder actively and provokingly without relying strictly on the individuals own insights into generating meaning or sensation from their environment. That, the art as it engages with its subject in a mediated representational dialectic between conceptions of the real and the art as image-object they gain an ability to affect the individual without their being subjected to the processes of the culture industry and the subversive nature of generating meaning within a representational mode. As Hansen explicates: “Adorno endows these objects with expressive agency. He ventures that the aspect that comes closest to making such objects resemble language, their mute speech, is most likely their sense of "Here I am or This is what I am”’ (234). The “expressive agency” for Hansen is Adorno’s conception of the affectability of art upon the spectator. That, the effectiveness of a artwork lies in the ability for it to have a relationship to a represented reality without disrupting a perception of the subject as subject. The subject of nature itself should “speak” as itself for the spectator and not strictly make them draw conclusions as to the subjectivity present in the artwork’s production. Finally, regarding the ‘natural’ in relation to film, the previous notions of intentionality as they appear in film are detrimental to Adorno’s goals regarding the individual’s perception of the natural and the ability to form the disjuncture of indexical image and reality remain the central mode by which a truly progressive artistic engagement with the natural can be achieved (236).

This segment, uninterrupted until its conclusion at the end of the chapter, marks the return of Hansen’s argumentation back to Adorno’s strict concerns with the cinematic processes, their potential, and their failings within the culture industry. Mediating through a historicizing process of identifying Adorno’s knowledge with the processes of film as technology, Hansen argues once again for the goal of subjective absence in Adorno’s perfect cinematic aesthetic mode (237). This also marks the point when Hansen becomes the most explicit in he representation of her argument concerning Adorno and his theory: “The argument for film's grounding in a subjective mode of experience is indifferent with regard to the technology on which it is based.” (237). In moments like these, we see Hansen as no longer strictly adhering to an analysis of Adorno via Adorno’s writings but instead relying on her past expository sequences to contextualize her arguments for her. A statement like: “As we have seen, Adorno's understanding of the temporality of natural beauty is bound up with the dialectical entwinement of nature and history.” (237) means we as readers no longer need to break down Adorno in relation to the general concepts and ideas that have permeated the entire chapter. The “primeval” (238) as concept becomes centralized into not only our previous understanding o the cinematic model of image progression relating to the dreamlike progression of images pre- interpretive that echo processes of montage. The contextualization of the objective real and the subjective and the interplay between the two in the processes of art are already established, so Hansen devolves into a sequential breakdown of how we might bring all of these separate concepts into a generalized aesthetic model for Adorno’s interactions with film. The Bazinian notions of “mummification” (238) and their relationship to film previously alluded to now comes into full play as we examine alongside Hansen and identification of how the culture-industry subjugates that regurgitation of the past in order to control perceptual notions of time (239). We follow this reasoning as extending to general notions of cinematic time (240), culminating in an examination of representational and non-representational reality and how our understanding of Adorno’s aesthetics in music (relating to art progressing over designated time) and the issues of rhythm as one of the potential disruptors of naturalized time in art (241-242). This line of reasoning can be summarized as an extension of the previous notions of cinematic time, regulated through montage as having the capacity to interrupt the naturalizing of each concoctive image by their unmotivated contrast with one another. Just as in Adorno’s notions of musical rhythm (243), constructing a new, non-traditionalized, treatment of rhythm makes the art engage with the spectator in a way in which indeterminacy construct an active interpretive relationship with the art in a way which traditional, normalized representations of time in rhythm do not (243). Hansen then branches out into less solid summarizations of Adorno in relation to strict filmic formal techniques and examples from films that may have operated with the kind of aesthetic model that Adorno would have praised (246). Antithèse becomes one of these objects of speculation concerning notions of disjunct sound/image relationships and montage representational sequences not strictly based on psychological processes (246). Touch of Evil becomes a central conceptual object for discussing choreography within the image-track (247), the emancipated process of ideological cinema is foregrounded and condemned within Hansen’s model of approximating Adorno, and finally we are given more direct argumentation for Adorno’s utopia of rebelling against the overarching culture industry by prioritizing engagements with directly, indexical represented subjects, engagements with environment, and the mediation of artist with the technical are summarized as models for using Adorno as film theorist (249-250).

At this point, through the extensive summarizing and synthesizing of Hansen’s argumentation in regards to how Adorno constructs his terminology of the subjective, natural, the interactivity of mediums with each other’s aesthetic principles, etc, we can begin to generalize what the core ‘rules’ of Adorno’s aesthetics might be. Now, obviously this list wouldn’t be comprehensive, as the construction of aesthetic principles relating to cinema have a tendency within Hansen’s work to be mediated by other mediums, and to identify the strict medium specific conception of an “Adornonian” cinematic aesthetic is tied into the sociological-political-artistic-historical processes which would branch off into most other art forms. Yet, due to the terminology which we arrived at the most through the summarization, we can attempt to synthesize Adorno’s aesthetic principles into a brief list of the progressive characteristics of a film.

The film must not be representational of reality in a way which normalizes sociological political processes. The sensationalizing of capitalist modes of understanding concepts like ‘the natural’ and social constructions like ‘work’ is detrimental to an engagement with empirical reality for the spectator.

The treatment of images, displaced through time in the method of attempting to approximate a ‘realist’ perception of reality is again, detrimental to a active engagement with the world of art and the interior modes perception that individuals adopt in lived reality.

The relationship of sound and image within the cinematic space cannot be marginalized to the role of atmospheric spectacle, each individual aspect of the cinematic space must remain individual, but operate in tandem to create a disjuncture between lived reality and the diegetic space.

Finally, the role of the cinematic artist must not collaborate with the culture industry, intentionally or unintentionally in reinstating traditionalist notions of engaging with the world through subjective meaning creation. Each image must be representative of itself, as itself and not attempt a overbearing of the ‘new subjectivity’ possible through film by attempting to approximate previous conceptions of subjectivity in mediating the world.

What remains is how we might actively envision or identify films which would adhere to Adorno’s envisioned utopia of cinematic aesthetic. The major issue present in the search for the perfect ‘Adorno’ film being the issue of profit as motivator (as previously outlined early in Hansens argumentation) and the issue of the non-representational as embodied by film. What images speak for themselves in cinema without being directly mediated by the camera, or worse explicitly allegorized by a narrator/character. Within popular cinema, productions that pride themselves on revealing the lived world through an unbiased lens, productions like Planet Earth (2006) engage directly with a conception of nature as the traditional ‘separate' idea, produced through the culture industry. Even in a film like Baraka (1992), which prides itself on having a direct engagement with different aspects of space and environment not linked to an interpretive mode still operates with the processes of synchronized sound which Adorno vilifies as normative to the cinematic processes of representing reality and by extension functions to subjugate the individuals notions of interiority in engaging with their environment. Yet, to what extent does Adorno’s methodology contribute in its entirety to the artistic ambitions of film? Adorno was operating within a filmic context mainly characterized by films that interacted with their subject matter in a way where film was meant to be the new means of mediation of the subjectivity of the auteur with lived reality through new technological processes. In the socio-industrial history of Touch of Evil, the films is representative of this model of attempting a new kind of artistry by adopting the genius of the director’s informed artistic insight into a renew medium. In effect, the most appropriate way to adopt Adorno into a modern cinematic aesthetic is by consuming his rhetoric piecemeal.

Works Cited

Hansen, Miriam Bratu. “The Question of Film Aesthetics.” Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno. 1st ed., University of California Press, 2012, 207-250. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/j.ctt1pp6c4.

Fricke, Ron, director. Baraka. Magidson Films, 1997.

Planet Earth. BBC Natural History Unit, Discovery Channel and NHK, 2006