Film’s photographic objectivity forces its aesthetics to include sociology

Evidence

The photographic process of film, primarily representational, places a higher intrinsic significance on the object, as foreign to subjectivity, than aesthetically autonomous techniques; this is the retarding aspect of film in the historical process of art. Even where film dissolves and modifies its objects as much as it can, the disintegration is never complete. Consequently, it does not permit absolute construction: its elements, however abstract, always retain something representational; they are never purely aesthetic values. Due to this difference, society projects into film quite differently - far more directly on account of the objects - than into advanced painting or literature. That which is irreducible about the objects in film is itself a mark of society, prior to the aesthetic realization of an intention. By virtue of this relationship to the object, the aesthetics of film is thus inherently concerned with society. There can be no aesthetics of the cinema, not even a purely technological one, which would not include the sociology of the cinema. — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 249

Categorization

• XREF: This grounds Kracauer’s Theory of Film critique — connects to the reader’s broader media-theory reading of Adorno, Benjamin, Brecht.
• DEFINE: Specifies why film differs from painting/literature: irreducible representational residue is the mechanism.