Cinematic montage compressing a life symbolizes humanity’s reduction to administrable elements

Evidence

You will remember those terrible scenes in the movies when some years of a hero’s life are pictured in a series of shots which take about one or two minutes, just to show how he grew up or old, how a war started and passed by, a[nd] s[o] o[n]. This trimming of an existence into some futile moments which can be characterized schematically symbolizes the dissolution of humanity into elements of administration. Mass culture in its different branches reflects the fact that the human being is cheated out of his own entity which Bergson so justly called “duree.” This is true for the heroes of biographies as well as for the masses… . The countertrend in mass culture is represented in escape from it. Since man’s wakeful state today is regulated in all details, the real escape is sleep or madness, or at least some kind of shortcoming and weakness. The protest against the movies is not found so much in bitter critiques but in the fact that people go in and sleep or make love to each other. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 642

Categorization

• XREF: Builds directly on Horkheimer/Adorno’s mass-culture critique later systematized in Dialectic of Enlightenment; connects to Adorno’s essay on jazz as castration. — connects to: Cinema’s image-reduction for commercial purposes blocks genuinely revolutionary film — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 2039
• SEED: An essay angle: how compression of duration in media — montage, timelines, summaries — functions as a form of administrative control over experience.

Broader Connections

• Cinema’s image-reduction for commercial purposes blocks genuinely revolutionary film #corroborates (0.72) — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 2039