Cinema as Total Work of Art

Cinema as Total Work of Art names the theoretical position, advanced in Kornbluh's Marxist film theory, that cinema fulfills — and dialectically transforms — the Romantic and idealist aspiration toward a Gesamtkunstwerk: a unified synthesis of all art forms in which human freedom is not merely represented but actualized. Where nineteenth-century aesthetics (Schiller, Wagner) imagined the total work of art as a regulative ideal or utopian horizon, cinema is argued to have materially realized it at the dawn of the twentieth century, precisely because it is the art form of industrial capitalism: a synthesis of image, sound, movement, narrative, performance, and technology that only the capitalist mode of production could have assembled.

The concept is not, however, straightforwardly celebratory. The "total work of art" claim is embedded in a dialectical analysis: cinema simultaneously symptomatizes capitalism's contradictions — its exploitation, its ideological operations, its reduction of creativity to commodity form — and gestures beyond them toward the utopian content that the form carries despite and through those conditions. This is what makes Marxist film theory's intervention necessary: auteurist frameworks suppress the dialectical tension by attributing cinema's power to individual genius, whereas centering mode of production, ideology, and class struggle allows the critic to read both capitalism's imprint on the form and the utopian surplus that exceeds it.

This concept appears once, in Kornbluh's Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club (kornbluh-marxist-film-theory-and-fight-club-bloomsbury-academic-2019, p.17), at the programmatic opening of her argument. It functions as the foundational aesthetic-historical claim that licenses the entire Marxist film theory project: if cinema really is the total work of art of global capitalism, then it is the privileged site for reading capitalism's contradictions, ideological operations, and utopian remainders all at once. The concept is therefore positioned at the intersection of the cross-referenced canonicals. It presupposes Contradiction as its analytic engine — cinema's totality is not harmonious but internally split between its conditions of production (exploitation, commodification) and its utopian aspirations (freedom, synthesis). It equally presupposes Ideology as what must be worked through: cinema's ideological function is not external to its aesthetic achievement but constitutive of it, and symptomatic reading is required to surface what the total form both reveals and conceals.

The concept also implicitly draws on Dialectics, Symptom, and Sublimation: the total work of art is not a simple triumph but a dialectical formation whose symptomatic dimension must be read alongside its sublimatory achievement. Universality enters insofar as the "total work of art" claim is a universalizing gesture — cinema as the art form of humanity's freedom — which Marxist critique must both affirm and interrogate. Finally, the Profilmic Event and Appearance concepts in the corpus concern how cinema's surface relates to underlying realities, a tension the total-work-of-art thesis foregrounds: cinema's synthesis is an appearance that both actualizes and mystifies its material conditions.

Marxist Film Theory and Fight ClubAnna Kornbluh · 2019 (p.17)

cinema arguably achieves at the dawn of the twentieth century the 'total work of art' longed for by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century thinkers: a synthesis of art forms that actualizes human freedom.

The phrase "actualizes human freedom" is theoretically loaded because it moves the concept from aesthetic category to ontological-political claim: the total work of art is not merely a formal synthesis but a material realization of freedom that prior centuries could only "long for," marking cinema as the dialectical fulfillment of Enlightenment and Romantic aesthetics under — and against — capitalist conditions of production.