Straub/Huillet—Brecht—Benjamin—Adorno

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. For the Threepenny Lawsuit, see: Brecht, Dreigroschenprozeß. For the “fundamental reproach,” see: Brecht, Arbeitsjournal. 399–400 (Vol. I. 27.3.1942). For the Hollywood poem, see Brecht, Hollywood. 2. Mummlius Spicer, for example, speaks with a “steady, deep voice … without any transition, simple, as though he were fulfilling a contract,” (16) while Afranius Carbo employs the “schooled voice of a lawyer” (26) and the Young Man himself, when reciting the Caesar anecdote, describes himself in the following manner: “When I quoted the famous anecdote, I gave my voice a little of that intonation in which I used to recite lines I had learned in front of my Greek teacher.” (44) 3. Handke feels that the quote is “moralizing-prophesying” (115) and detracts from the film, while Chevalier agrees: “It's a shame that the film ends on the Brecht-text, warning of the ever-present risk of war, as it has a reductive effect on the film's reception. It did not need this quote.” (12). 4. Tantalizingly, though, Kluge writes, “The films of Godard and some examples of the Young German Cinema made an impression on [Adorno], due to their manifest difference with Hollywood productions,” but is not more specific (Cited in: Brenez 285). 5. See: Ishaghpour, Cinéma contemporain 109–124; Byg 233–248; Brenez 283. 6. The evidence for this viewpoint is manifold. As examples: “Unending sameness also governs the relationship to the past. What is new in the phase of mass culture compared to that of late liberalism is the exclusion of the new. The machine is rotating on the spot” (Aufklärung 142). “Every film is a preview of the next, which promises yet again to unite the same heroic couple under the same exotic sun: anyone arriving late can not tell whether he is watching the trailer or the real thing” (Aufklärung 172). “The totality of the culture industry … [consists of] repetition. The fact that its characteristic innovations are in all cases mere improvements to mass production is not extraneous to the system” (Aufklärung 144). 7. As Brenez affirms: “Like many artists and theoreticians of his era, Adorno, however, accorded an almost extraterritorial status to Chaplin … The exceptional importance of Chaplin for Adorno continues to be uncovered in his analyses on the invention of the actor where he sees, inversely, the elaboration of a model of liberty” (281, 282). 8. Perez, for instance, contends: “Adorno and Greenberg were wrong in their sweeping dismissal of popular culture … their rejection of popular art in the name of high art pointed the way to the recuperation of the avant-garde as high art enshrined by the bourgeois culture it intended to contest” (277, 278). 9. “Lyotard sees the postmodern as marking the moment after one phase of modernist innovation has gained acceptance and before the next phase begins: the postmodern not as a break with the modern but as the moment between modernist breaks” (Perez 282). 10. See, for instance, the statement: “Only [the public's] deep unconscious mistrust, the last residue of the difference between art and empirical reality in the spiritual make-up of the masses explains why they have not, to a person, long since perceived and accepted the world as it is constructed for them by the culture industry.” (Kulturindustrie 344). And: “If it seeks to keep a grip on the masses, the ideology of the culture industry itself becomes as internally antagonistic as the very society which it is targeting. It contains the antidote to its own lie” (Filmtransparente 356). 11. “That artworks can make political interventions is dubious; if this does occur, then it is most often peripheral to the artworks; endeavoring to achieve this usually causes the artwork to sink under the term” (ÄT 359). Furthermore: “The political positions explicitly taken by artworks are, in contrast, epiphenomena, mostly resulting in a burden on the development of the artworks, and, in addition, the termination of their social truth content” (ÄT 344). 12. “When I read Marx's Capital, I understood my plays … This Marx was the only spectator for my plays I had ever seen.” (Zuschauer 69).