How is the artistic autonomy of film possible: negation, shock, and aesthetic encounter

From the perspective of the culture industry, the artistic autonomy of film is most acutely manifested as an aesthetic predicament under the conditions of technological reproduction, collective production, and commodity circulation. Adorno’s model of ‘substantive autonomy’, grounded in the internally coherent formal structure of the artwork, can account for the formal negativity of modernist art, yet it cannot fully explain the technological and collaborative nature of the film medium. The possibility of filmic autonomy should therefore be relocated from the closed substance of the artwork to the aesthetic encounter among authorial formal construction, the filmic text, and spectatorial reception. Through editing, duration, sound, narrative structure, and modes of performance, the film author constructs an apparatus of negation. This apparatus enables the film to resist the smooth resolution of meaning and perception, while organising a systematic encounter between spectator and text. Benjamin’s concept of shock may thus be reinterpreted as a perceptual event in which the spectator’s established structures of perception are interrupted and loosened under the impact of heterogeneous forms. In this sense, filmic autonomy emerges as a relational critical event generated among the apparatus of negation, the disturbance of spectatorial perception, and aesthetic encounter.