Abstract In 1945, exiled members of the Institut für Sozialforschung commissioned two sets of Hollywood scriptwriters to write a film. In both tone and narrative, the resulting script assembles what Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer scathingly describe in the Dialectic of Enlightenment as “rigidly invariable types” and “ready-made clichés” into a melodramatic love story—it was to be an object of the culture industry that would surely function as mass deception. But the film was not intended to be art: Rather, these Frankfurt School social scientists conceived the film as part of a large-scale multidisciplinary investigation into antisemitism and its underlying causes that was funded by the American Jewish Committee. In addition to publishing empirical and theoretical investigations, these “Studies in Prejudice” had the goal of revealing the characteristics of antisemitism through experimentation. It was here that the film project came into play: Several versions of a twenty-minute fiction film entitled “Below the Surface” were to be made, respectively featuring a Jewish man, an African American man, and a white male white-collar worker as the scapegoat in an incident on the New York subway, each of whom experiences different forms of verbal abuse according to how they are perceived by other passengers. These three versions would be screened to different control groups, and audiences’ prejudicial reactions to the incident and its perceived perpetrator would be analyzed by way of questionnaires and discussions after the screening. The objective of the film was therefore to expose (and address) latent prejudice that lurked “below the surface” of viewers’ conscious minds. The film was never made and none of the planned research activities surrounding its screening could be carried out. The reason for its failure is one of several puzzling plot twists and turns in the story of the Frankfurt School's experimental movie project. The only published versions of “Below the Surface” are attributed to film critic and theorist Siegfried Kracauer and appear in two collected volumes of his works, yet he almost certainly did not write the script. So how did Kracauer mistakenly come to be viewed as the sole author of the unmade film? The second mystifying detail I consider relates to the way in which “Below the Surface” seems to simply fade from view in 1947. Archival documents suggest that a lack of funds and time are the most plausible reasons for its failure, but I contend that the representational politics of the film project proved equally challenging to those designing the experiment. For example, Hans Richter, acting as a script consultant, cautioned against the script's reproduction of stereotypes, noting that the unequal distribution of sympathy towards different characters implicitly created a hierarchy of identification (and humanity). This article offers analysis of the African American script version partly to make the case that it is worth considering as a remarkable text that connects the Frankfurt School with questions of cinema, Blackness, and anti-Black racism in the context of 1940s Hollywood. However, drawing on thinkers like Audre Lorde, Sara Ahmed, Christina Sharpe, and bell hooks, I also argue that “Below the Surface” ultimately reinforced the racist stereotypes that Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and the other Institute members were urgently trying to expose as erroneous, and that this failure in the film's visual language doomed it to fail from the beginning.
Leila Mukhida (Thu,) studied this question.