Vincenzo Cerulli

Negative cinema: non-intentionality, disruptions and uncontrollability in the filmmaking practice

This research investigates the role of non-intentionality and uncontrollability in the process of filmmaking, developing the concept of “negative cinema” in dialogue with Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory. Departing from the observation that filmmaking is constitutively exposed to unforeseen accidents that resist and reconfigure the director’s project from within, the research proposes that what Adorno identifies as the “negativity” of artistic practices finds in cinema a particularly vivid and analytically productive manifestation. Through a series of case studies drawn from the history of the medium, and supported by interviews with directors, actors and editors, the research examines the filming and editing stages as key moments in which this exposure to contingency and uncontrollability becomes particularly evident. In doing so, it proposes a new theoretical framework for understanding cinematic creation as a practice irreducibly shaped by what it cannot foresee, plan, or wilfully control: and in which this very uncontrollability becomes, in Adorno’s terms, a condition of aesthetic possibility.