Theodor W. Adorno (1903–69) was the Director of the Institute of Social Research in Frankfurt am Main from 1958. He is the author of many books, including Dialectic of Enlightenment (with Max Horkheimer, 1947; English trans. 1972), Composing for the Films (with Hanns Eisler, 1947; English trans. 1997), Philosophy of Modern Music (1949; English trans. 1973), Minima Moralia (1951; English trans. 1974), Against Epistemology: A Metacritique (1956; English trans. 1982), Negative Dialectics (1966; English trans. 1973) and Aesthetic Theory (1970; English trans. 1984), and co-editor and co-author of The Authoritarian Personality (1950). Adorno's pessimistic view that film is irredeemably popular in the consumerist sense is so well known as to cause a recent critical theorist to entitle his book on popular culture Roll over Adorno. Whereas in literature and particularly in music Adorno identifies the promise of a genuinely emancipatory art, in film he largely (although, as will be shown, not entirely) sees all the reasons why we need liberation. In part his attitude is a product of personal experience: he spent his exile from Germany during the Second World War in Los Angeles just next door to Hollywood, the headquarters of what he, along with Max Horkheimer, came to call the “culture industry.”