Page 37 - Cinematic Thinking Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema

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Luchino Visconti
Insights into Flesh and Blood

ALEXANDER GARCl'A D Ü T T M A N N

LUCHINO VISCONTTS FILMS give expression to an insight of
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Adorno's from Negative Dialectics. At the end of his introduction Adorno
writes: "Utopia is blocked off by possibility, never by immediate reality." 2
As a declaration of my intent, such a claim raises a number of questions,
questions regarding intellectual and historical links, questions regarding
definitions, questions regarding the relationship between art and concept.
Do I wish to understand Viscontfs films as an emotive or vivid illustration
of an insight that he and Adorno share but that the latter grasps conceptu-
ally? Perhaps there would be no objection to such a view or interpretation,
at least not if one's starting point is that one can speak of an insight and
that speaking of an insight does not imply a priority of the concept. Some-
thing can be understood as much by the means of the expression elevating
the films above blind intuition as by the aphoristic sharpness issuing from
the resources of the concept, even as it remains bound to experience. The
exercises of the understanding and the respective intelligibility that they
produce may, however, turn out to be scarcely comparable, perhaps even
incomparable.
Here one might recall the following entry in Hans-Erich Nossacks
diary: "Indeed, how could you then even want to share a thought that
has passed into your flesh and blood? Such a thought can be expressed no
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longer in words, but only in an act." Nossack is not saying that between
thought and act a mediating authority intrudes, a reflection similar to his
diary entry. Rather, the thought has shed its ties to reflection. Without
ceasing to be a thought, it has thereby transformed itself, and, as an act, it

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