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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Daniel Mourenza Urbina
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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: Collective Innervations 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 surveys the texts that Benjamin wrote during his life — scattered among essays, notes, letters, and journalistic articles — in order to provide a comprehensive reading of Benjamin’s engagement with cinema. Daniel Mourenza closely examines the way in which Benjamin developed his film aesthetics through careful readings not only of ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility’ but also his shorter and lesser known texts. The book situates all these writings with Benjamin’s ‘anthropological materialism’ and the way that he understood technology was changing the human sensorium. 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 film.
Author(s): Mourenza D
Series Editor(s): Maryse Elliott
Publication type: Authored Book
Publication status: Published
Series Title: Film, Media & Communication
Year: 2020
Number of Pages: 258
Print publication date: 21/02/2020
Acceptance date: 18/09/2018
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Place Published: Amsterdam
URL: https://www.aup.nl/en/book/9789048529353/walter-benjamin-and-the-aesthetics-of-film
Library holdings: Search Newcastle University Library for this item
ISBN: 9789048529353
