Another view on

A note on cinema and the culture industry from playwright John Steppling's Blog:

"One of the effects of advanced capital and its mass production of everything, and its embedded militaristic ethic is that practice became repetition, and the machine like reptition of industry has imprinted itself on all cultural expression. Adorno saw the increasingly militaristic in certain conductors, the baton more and more resembling a implement with which to beat the audience. Technology needs no practice. And without practice, there is no self portrait. The camera is finally an intermediary that cuts the user of the camera, the technician, off from his creation. Now, there are alternative routes to get to the final artwork, the photograh, say, and partly this alternative route is what is so compelling. There is an occluding of this step, in most writing on photography, and probably, too, on cinema. One of the qualities in Ozu that destabilizes, still, all of his films, is that the camera becomes a field of practice. By placing it on the tatami mat, same height each shot, and then by rehearsing his actors at compulsive length, Ozu was offering something closer to makoto. I think Bresson might be the only other director that so looked to cross the technical divide, or gulf, or maybe, abyss."

This might be another version of the worry that photography, and film, are too passive, too automatic, to be mimetic in the way that painting can be.