In the early 1940s, composer Hanns Eisler and the philosopher Theodor W. Adorno carried out during their exile in New York an unprecedented research on the characteristics of film music. The main objective of that project, titled in its day Film Music Project, was to apply modern music to the big screen in order to extend the artistic potential of the cinematographic medium. As they once pointed out, "advanced musical material loses its prohibitive quality when applied to cinema." In a period dominated by conventional Hollywood productions, and even with the fear of applying 'Hegelian terminology to a pink press column', Eisler and Adorno believed that the twelve-tone composition could help the cinema to obtain the true artistic status Deserved The Film Music Project was also a perfect example of a union between the two main tendencies of the German Marxist aesthetics of the first hal...read more