Semblance of Immediacy: Adorno’s Cinema Aesthetics (DUOs)

Written by Christopher Kostopoulos and Joseph Bermas-Dawes. Presented on May 17th, 2024.

Written and researched in collaboration with Philosophy P.h.D. candidate Joseph Bermas-Dawes at DePaul University— who is writing his dissertation on Theodor Adorno and psychoanalysis— as part of the DUOs program.

Presented in front of DePaul’s Philosophy department, this paper probes Theodor Adorno’s notoriously critical sociological analysis of cinema’s role in capitalist society in an attempt to salvage what an “emancipated” cinema could look like. Through Adorno’s scathing critiques of film form, we discover contradictory tensions in cinema form that glean a more radical, autonomous vision for film form clashing with violence latent within the medium itself.