Gonzalo M. Aguiar
Cinema at the Crossroads between
Technology and Technique: A Few Notes on Hans Richter�s Vormittagsspuk
Despite the fact
that Adorno, in his early writings, did not rank cinema as one of the most
important aesthetic mediums in contemporary art (Hansen 187), he soon discovers
the importance of cinematic events in his definition of art as a continuous
process of becoming. His rather pessimistic attitude towards art (Theory
3) becomes itself an excellent point of departure from which art can be defined
in terms of its ultimate denial of traditional categorizations that constrain
the flow of information coming from a work of art rejecting an ideological
principle of construction (Theory 57). In other words, Adorno situates
art outside of the realm of being in order to decode its heterogeneous message
according to an analytical discourse that goes well beyond psychological or
historical explanations of the aesthetic artifact. As the principle of identity
is always self-contradictory (Eagleton 346), an assertion that is frequently
repeated throughout Adornos text, we should look first to the way his Aesthetic
Theory offers itself as a critical response to a certain bourgeois
conception about the aesthetic pleasure found in art.
It is my opinion
that Vormittagssspuk (also known as Ghosts Before Breakfast), a
German short film made in 1928 by Hans Richter, clearly illustrates some of the
ideas stated above. In this film, which was once labeled as degenerate art
and confiscated by the Nazis, the relationship between technique and technology
in the wake of mass culture is at the very core of his argument. Adorno was
criticized for his lack of commitment to cinematic syntax which is necessary in
order to properly read the inner structure of any given film (Hansen 188), a
matter that was promptly addressed in his last writings on the subject. In the
short film I am referring to, however, there is a sense of playfulness that calls
into question Adornos assessment of mass culture as something devoid of
problematization in contemporary art (Schema 74). In this way, I believe that
the manipulation of sound and image can be extremely significant to an analysis
of this type of work, in which the deliberate rearrangement of the cinematic mise-en-scene
not only speaks in favor of alternative systems of production, but also helps
to further some of the Adornos arguments on mass culture.
Especially
noticeable is the use of the camera to convey a set of meanings that ultimately
mocks an artistic perception shaped by bourgeois sensibility. Through the
systematic use of extremely low camera angles (the character who is constantly
ascending and descending a staircase, for instance), the quite expressive use
of extreme close-ups (a set of shots which shows, a bit obscenely, a mouth full
of cavities), or the continuous reframing of the picture, as if the whole film
were simply a work in progress, are cinematic techniques delivering a specific
message against reification in art. This variety of filmic devices has the
purpose of breaking with traditional conceptions of time and space and
simultaneously forcing a reflection on the upcoming crisis of art in the
aftermath of World War I. As Adorno states, this point of my discussion is
related to the aporia of art (Theory 54): Art is rationality that
criticizes rationality without withdrawing from it; art is not something
prerational or irrational, which would peremptorily condemn it as untruth in
the face of the entanglement of all human activity in the social totality.
Rational and irrational theories of art are therefore equally faulty (Theory
55). For this reason, Adornos strong disapproval of both standpoints calls for
a new location of culture, something that in the case of cinema may be between
technology and technique, between naturalization and the manipulation of
artistic events.
As a result, a
key feature in Richters short film is the manipulation of montage in order to
deconstruct a sense of aesthetic pleasure that once fulfilled artistic
expectations of the hegemonic class. Described by Adorno as baby-food
(Schema 67), this type of aesthetic product is designed to provide pleasant
feelings that ultimately affirm class position in the existing order of things:
Aesthetic truth was bound to the expression of the untruth of bourgeois
society (Schema 77). Through discontinuity editing, Richter is capable of
managing signs associated with capitalist fetishes and turning them into
something which goes against the very system that produces them. Vormitagsspuk
is full of references to the bourgeois world and its respectable members who
are incapable of retrieving their own signs of identity. Every time we see them
chasing their own hats, flying objects traveling through the air with the sky
as a mocking background of their useless efforts, this experimental film sheds
light upon the questionable aesthetic principles on which the whole bourgeois
sensibility is constructed. Similarly, the associational montage of guns and
heads is implicitly invoking about a sociopolitical context in which
In short, Adornos
debatable position brings to light some of the most important issues on
traditional aesthetics and the way they should be reconsidered when speaking
about contemporary art. If I agree with him that dissonance is the truth of
harmony (Eagleton 353), then I should point out as well that every single
phenomenon in art must be submitted to a carefully detailed definition of the
aesthetics as something in which a historical truth and a structural
ideological message are deeply intertwined.
Works Cited
Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory.
---. The Schema of Mass Culture. The
Culture Industry.
Eagleton, Terry. The Ideology of the
Aesthetic.
Hansen, Miriam. Introduction to Adorno,
Transparencies on Film. New German Critique 24-25 (1981-1982):
186-198.
Richter, Hans. Vormittagsspuk.