Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Film
Title | Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Film PDF eBook |
Author | Daniel Mourenza |
Publisher | Amsterdam University Press |
Pages | 260 |
Release | 2020-02-05 |
Genre | Performing Arts |
ISBN | 9048529352 |
Walter Benjamin is today regarded as one of the leading thinkers of the twentieth century. Often captured in pensive pose, his image is now that of a serious intellectual. But Benjamin was also a fan of the comedies of Adolphe Menjou, Mickey Mouse, and Charlie Chaplin. As an antidote to repressive civilization, he developed, through these figures, a theory of laughter. Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Film is the first monograph to thoroughly analyse Benjamin's film writings, contextualizing them within his oeuvre whilst also paying attention to the various films, actors, and directors that sparked his interest. The book situates all these writings within Benjamin's 'anthropological materialism', a concept that analyses the transformations of the human sensorium through technology. Through the term 'innervation', Benjamin thought of film spectatorship as an empowering reception that, through a rush of energy, would form a collective body within the audience, interpenetrating a liberated technology into the distracted spectators. Benjamin's writings on Soviet film and German cinema, Charlie Chaplin, and Mickey Mouse are analysed in relation to this posthuman constellation that Benjamin had started to dream of in the early twenties, long before he started to theorize about films.
Cinema and Experience
Title | Cinema and Experience PDF eBook |
Author | Miriam Hansen |
Publisher | Univ of California Press |
Pages | 406 |
Release | 2012 |
Genre | Art |
ISBN | 0520265599 |
Kracauer. Film, medium of a disintegrating world. -- Curious Americanism. -- Benjamin. Actuality, antinomies. -- Aura: the appropriation of a concept. -- Mistaking the moon for a ball. -- Micky-maus. -- Room-for-play. -- Adorno. The question of film aesthetics. -- Kracauer in exile. Theory of film.
Religion and Film
Title | Religion and Film PDF eBook |
Author | S. Brent Plate |
Publisher | Columbia University Press |
Pages | 245 |
Release | 2017-09-05 |
Genre | Religion |
ISBN | 0231545797 |
Religion and cinema share a capacity for world making, ritualizing, mythologizing, and creating sacred time and space. Through cinematography, mise-en-scène, editing, and other production activities, film takes the world “out there” and refashions it. Religion achieves similar ends by setting apart particular objects and periods of time, telling stories, and gathering people together for communal actions and concentrated focus. The result of both cinema and religious practice is a re-created world: a world of fantasy, a world of ideology, a world we long to live in, or a world we wish to avoid at all costs. Religion and Film introduces readers to both religious studies and film studies by focusing on the formal similarities between cinema and religious practices and on the ways they each re-create the world. Explorations of film show how the cinematic experience relies on similar aesthetic devices on which religious rituals have long relied: sight, sound, the taste of food, the body, and communal experience. Meanwhile, a deeper understanding of the aesthetic nature of religious rituals can alter our understanding of film production. Utilizing terminology and theoretical insights from the study of religion as well as the study of film, Religion and Film shows that by paying attention to the ways films are constructed, we can shed new light on the ways religious myths and rituals are constructed and vice versa. This thoroughly revised and expanded new edition is designed to appeal to the needs of courses in religion as well as film departments. In addition to two new chapters, this edition has been restructured into three distinct sections that offer students and instructors theories and methods for thinking about cinema in ways that more fully connect film studies with religious studies.
Walter Benjamin
Title | Walter Benjamin PDF eBook |
Author | Richard Wolin |
Publisher | Univ of California Press |
Pages | 379 |
Release | 2023-09-01 |
Genre | Philosophy |
ISBN | 0520914309 |
Few twentieth-century thinkers have proven as influential as Walter Benjamin, the German-Jewish philosopher and cultural and literary critic. Richard Wolin's book remains among the clearest and most insightful introductions to Benjamin's writings, offering a philosophically rich exposition of his complex relationship to Adorno, Brecht, Jewish Messianism, and Western Marxism. Wolin provides nuanced interpretations of Benjamin's widely studied writings on Baudelaire, historiography, and art in the age of mechanical reproduction. In a new Introduction written especially for this edition, Wolin discusses the unfinished Arcades Project, as well as recent tendencies in the reception of Benjamin's work and the relevance of his ideas to contemporary debates about modernity and postmodernity.
The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media
Title | The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media PDF eBook |
Author | Walter Benjamin |
Publisher | Harvard University Press |
Pages | 452 |
Release | 2008-05-31 |
Genre | Art |
ISBN | 9780674024458 |
A series of influential essays on the visual arts that were made possible by machines, and the implications for the future of culture.
Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Power
Title | Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Power PDF eBook |
Author | Lutz Peter Koepnick |
Publisher | U of Nebraska Press |
Pages | 296 |
Release | 1999-01-01 |
Genre | Philosophy |
ISBN | 9780803227446 |
Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Power explores Walter Benjamin?s seminal writings on the relationship between mass culture and fascism. The book offers a nuanced reading of Benjamin?s widely influential critique of aesthetic politics, while it contributes to current debates about the cultural projects of Nazi Germany, the changing role of popular culture in the twentieth century, and the way in which Nazi aesthetics have persisted into the present. Lutz Koepnick first explores the development of the aestheticization thesis in Benjamin?s work from the early 1920s to his death in 1940. Pushing Benjamin?s fragmentary remarks to a logical conclusion, Koepnick sheds light on the ways in which the Nazis employed industrial mass culture to redress the political as a self-referential space of authenticity and self-assertion. Koepnick then examines to what extent Benjamin?s analysis of fascism holds up to recent historical analyses of the National Socialist period and whether Benjamin?s aestheticization thesis can help conceptualize cultural politics today. Although Koepnick insists on crucial differences between the stage-managing of political action in modern and postmodern societies, he argues throughout that it is in Benjamin?s emphatic insistence on experience that we may find the relevance of his reflections today. Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Power is both an important contribution to Benjamin studies and a revealing addition to our understanding of the Third Reich and of contemporary culture?s uneasy relationship to Nazi culture.
German Film After Germany
Title | German Film After Germany PDF eBook |
Author | Randall Halle |
Publisher | University of Illinois Press |
Pages | 258 |
Release | 2008-06-25 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 0252033299 |
A focused examination of German film's transformation from a national to transnational industry