Abstract
This chapter discusses the contributions of key members and affiliates of the Frankfurt School of Critical Social Theory to the theory of film. Central to all of these contributions, which tend to be based on some account of Marxism, is that they socially and historically locate film production within capitalism and the various ideological constraints of modernity and late modernity. Being highly skeptical of the so-called culture industry, which is said to produce ideology, the school debated avant-garde film practices, including montage. Walter Benjamin’s positive view regarding the key political role of film was subjected to criticism by Theodor W. Adorno yet influenced the artistic movement referred to as New German Cinema. The legacy of the Frankfurt School’s interest in analyzing ideology and the conditions of non-reified experience remains important to contemporary trends in advanced filmmaking.
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Notes
- 1.
Rolf Wiggershaus, TheFrankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance, trans. Michael Robertson (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1998); Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923–1950 (London: Heinemann, 1973).
- 2.
Herbert Marcuse, “The Affirmative Character of Culture,” in Negations: Essays in Critical Theory, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), 88–133.
- 3.
For Ernst Bloch’s conception of literature and utopia, see The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays, trans. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1989). Bloch was for a while quite close to Adorno and influenced him. However, he was never a formal member of the Institute for Social Research.
- 4.
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility,” trans. Edmund Jephcott, in Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (eds.), Selected Writings, vol. 3 (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 2006), pp. 251–83.
- 5.
Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence, trans. Nicholas Walker (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), esp. pp. 127–33.
- 6.
Ibid., p. 131.
- 7.
Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: Merlin Press, 1971).
- 8.
Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (London and New York: Verso, 1979).
- 9.
Theodor W. Adorno, “Culture Industry Reconsidered,” The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, trans. Anson Rabinbach (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 85.
- 10.
Ibid., p. 86.
- 11.
Ibid., p. 89.
- 12.
Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 140.
- 13.
Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of German Film (London: Dobson, 1947).
- 14.
Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960).
- 15.
André Bazin, What is Cinema? trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967).
- 16.
Theodor W. Adorno, “Transparencies on Film,” in The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, pp. 154–61.
- 17.
Ibid., p. 156.
- 18.
Ibid., p. 157.
- 19.
Ibid., p. 158.
- 20.
For an astute account of how the question of Erfahrung plays out in relation to Adorno’s understanding of film, see Miriam Bratu Hansen, Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2012).
- 21.
Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1991).
- 22.
Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt, Public Sphere and Experience: Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere, trans. Peter Labanyi, Jamie Owen Daniel, and Assenka Oksiloff (London: Verso, 2016).
- 23.
Bratu Hansen, Cinema and Experience, p. xiv.
- 24.
Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).
- 25.
The manifesto was initiated by Haro Senft.
- 26.
Karl Marx, Early Political Writings, trans. Joseph O’Malley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 145–48. See also Allen W. Wood, Karl Marx (New York and London: Routledge, 1981), pp. 118–21.
- 27.
See, for example, Raymond Geuss, The Idea of a Critical Theory: Habermas and the Frankfurt School (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 2–3: “The very heart of the Critical Theory of society is its criticism of ideology.”
Bibliography
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Habermas, Jürgen. 1991. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Trans. Thomas Burger. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
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Kluge, Alexander and Oskar Negt. 2016. Public Sphere and Experience: Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere. Trans. Peter Labanyi, Jamie Owen Daniel, and Assenka Oksiloff. London: Verso.
Kracauer, Siegfried. 1947. From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film. London: Dobson.
Lukács, Georg. 1971. History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. London: Merlin Press.
Marcuse, Herbert. 1968. The Affirmative Character of Culture. In Negations: Essays in Critical Theory, 88–133. Trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro. Boston: Beacon Press.
Marx, Karl. 1994. Early Political Writings. Trans. Joseph O’Malley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wiggershaus, Rolf. 1998. The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance. Trans. Michael Robertson. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Wood, Allen W. 1981. Karl Marx. New York/London: Routledge.
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Hammer, E. (2019). Ideology and Experience: The Legacy of Critical Theory. In: Carroll, N., Di Summa, L.T., Loht, S. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19601-1_14
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