{"id":1810,"date":"2016-10-08T20:17:29","date_gmt":"2016-10-08T20:17:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thepromiseofcinema.com\/?page_id=1810"},"modified":"2017-01-06T01:21:27","modified_gmt":"2017-01-06T01:21:27","slug":"on-benjamins-theory-of-film","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/www.thepromiseofcinema.com\/index.php\/on-benjamins-theory-of-film\/","title":{"rendered":"On Benjamin’s Theory of Film"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Benjamin’s Theory of Film<\/span><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\r\n

HOWARD EILAND<\/span><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\r\n

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\"Gis\u00e8le

Gis\u00e8le Freund, Walter Benjamin in the Biblioth\u00e8que Nationale (1939)<\/p><\/div>\r\n<\/center>\r\n

A\u00a0<\/span><\/span>highly condensed note in The Arcades Project<\/em>, dating probably from the late 1920s, offers what is possibly the broadest and boldest statement on film that we have today from Walter Benjamin. The note has its place in the context of methodological formulations concerning the temporality of historical interpretation and what is conceived of, in this serendipitous study of nineteenth-century Paris, as historical dream and historical awakening. One awakens from \u201cthat dream we name the past\u201d only by descending back through remembrance into the convolute of the dream itself; one wakes simultaneously from <\/em>and to<\/em> a dream past in order to waken a present day. So historical awakening is prepared in dreaming of the past. It is nothing short of a \u201cCopernican revolution in historical perception\u201d that Benjamin announces here, in Convolute K of the Arcades<\/em>: a momentous theoretical turn toward a dialectical method of historical remembrance pivoting on \u201cthe higher concreteness of now-being.\u201d[1]<\/a> Such perception is dialectical because it is turned toward past and present at the same time; it is their virtual convergence as monad and mutual tension in an experience of recognition. In this precipitous constellatory temporality, in which time at once shrinks and expands, the moment of remembrance is thus \u201cpreformed\u201d in its object.<\/span><\/p>\r\n

Benjamin distinguishes this encapsulated historical force field of now-being, this oscillating now of recognizability, from what we like to call the present in the construction of chronological time, \u201csince [now-being] is a being punctuated and intermittent.\u201d You begin to see here the connection to film form in this species of montage thinking, this dialectical theory of historical understanding, or, to put it a little differently, this monadological conception of truth. Benjamin goes on to expound the so-to-speak chemical interaction of present and past in his historical-materialist philosophy of time\u2014the present as a critical and creative distillation of the past\u2014in words that bear on the stated intention of The Promise of Cinema<\/em>, namely, to reconstruct a specific set of historical debates on the subject of film:<\/span><\/p>\r\n

And this dialectical penetration and actualization of former contexts puts the truth of the present action to the test. Or rather, it serves to ignite the explosive materials that are latent in what has been\u2026. To approach, in this way, what has been [So an das Gewesene herangehen<\/em>] means to treat it not historiographically, as heretofore, but politically, in political categories. [K2,3]<\/span><\/p>\r\n

By fostering a new awakening of the many-sided discourse on the medium of film in Weimar Germany, The Promise of Cinema<\/em> has enabled a broad comprehension of the theoretical-political sources of Benjamin\u2019s foray into film theory, something anyone interested in Benjamin must be grateful for. (Among the selections having a significant relation to Benjamin\u2019s fragmentary theory, I would mention in particular those by Bal\u00e1zs, Kracauer, Luk\u00e1cs, Hofmannsthal, Ruttmann, Moholy-Nagy, Haas, and Richter.)<\/span><\/p>\r\n

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