Cinema’s fragmented images function as a script to be read, not contemplated

Evidence

The dream industry does not so much fabricate the dreams of the customers as introduce the dreams of the suppliers among the people. … The authentic images of the film screen as well as the inauthentic ones encountered in hit melodies and the well-worn written phrase appear so rigidly and so frequently that they are no longer perceived in their own right but only as repetitions whose perpetual sameness always expresses an identical meaning. The looser the connection in the sequence of events or the development of the action, the more the shattered image becomes an allegorical seal. Even from the visual point of view the sudden evanescent images of the cinema come to resemble a sort of script. The images are seized but not contemplated. The film reel draws the eye along just like a line of writing and it turns the page with the gentle jolt of every scene change. — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 132

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘images are seized but not contemplated’ claim maps onto modern short-form video — TikTok and Reels — where the scavenging-eye/script metaphor is even more exact than for film. — connects to: Fast-paced media design structurally prevents sustained reflection, not merely by audience laziness. — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 99
• SEED: Angle: use the ‘priestly hieroglyphic script’ and ‘images seized not contemplated’ to analyze infinite-scroll feeds as the perfected form of allegorical seal.