Adorno, Lewis Klahr and the Shuddering Image

This chapter considers animation’s relationship to the document and documentary form from a broadly Marxist perspective. It uses Marxist aesthetic theory to demonstrate how analysing an animated film’s ‘constructedness’ can allow for critical examination of the construction of reality as lived under capitalism. Specifically, the chapter analyses the stop-frame and cut-out animated films of Lewis Klahr. Klahr’s films show capitalist reality not as an unmediated realm, but as a reality enmeshed in American and European image cultures. His films are literally built from the material residue of the recent past, creating dense psycho-social narratives out of re-animated ‘dead’ images. This chapter views Klahr’s films as realist documents in relation to two arguments. Firstly, Siegfried Kracauer’s suggestion that film engages reality through its constructed “material dimension”. Secondly, Theodor Adorno’s proposal that the shuddering (animated) image is encoded with a hidden, social content that provokes unease in the viewer.