Benjamin, Cinema and Experience: "The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology"

Hansen, Miriam

doi:10.2307/488138

Cited by 182 publications

(35 citation statements)

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“…Hence photography ranks in the highest order of surrealist creativity because it produces an image that is a reality of nature, namely, an hallucination that is also a fact. (p. 16) Benjamin and Bazin (at least in this moment of the 'Ontology' essay) might agree that the reality film captures is, to borrow Miriam Hansen's (1987) phrasing, 'no less phantasmagorical than the "natural" phenomenon of the commodity world it endlessly replicates' (p. 204). Or, as Bazin (2000) writes in praise of Jean Painlevé's microbiological science films: 'cinema reveals that which no other procedure of investigation, not even the eye, can perceive' (p. 145).…”

Section: The Limits Of Anthropocentric Attention: Bazin and Benjaminmentioning

confidence: 99%

Seeing/Loving Animals: André Bazin's Posthumanism

Fay

2008

Journal of Visual Culture

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French film theorist André Bazin was fascinated by films in which humans and animals are framed together, especially in circumstances in which the presence of one signals the endangerment of the other. By putting Bazin and two films he admired (Kon Tiki and Umberto D) in conversation with Jacques Derrida's writing on the animal and Walter Benjamin's infrahuman optics, this article argues that Bazin's commitments to cinematic realism and the recurrence in his writing of human/animal propinquity signal a distinctly posthumanist ethics. Jacques Perrin's Winged Migration realizes Bazin's interest in a cinema that de-centers and even absents the human. It may also be a film that answers Derrida's call that we not just look at animals, but feel ourselves seen by them.

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Section: The Limits Of Anthropocentric Attention: Bazin and Benjaminmentioning

confidence: 99%

Seeing/Loving Animals: André Bazin's Posthumanism

Fay

2008

Journal of Visual Culture

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“…In this way, as Hansen (1987) indicates in 'Benjamin, Cinema and Experience: "The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology"', 'shock may assume a strategic significance -as an artificial means of propelling the human body into moments of recognition' (p. 211). In its ability to expand space, extend motion and enlarge a perspective, the camera reveals, in a somatic and visual way, the unknown or unexpected that exists in the familiar (Benjamin, 1969(Benjamin, [1935[1931: 510).…”

Section: Perhaps It's Not the Place Itself That Matters For When I Ementioning

confidence: 99%

“…19 Instead, the images happen to the beholder in a way that refuses narrativizing. As such, it bears a certain relation to Hansen's (1987) discussion of Proustian remembrance: 'Remembrance ... is incompatible with conscious remembering which tends to historicize ... not self-reflection, but an integral "actuality", a "bodily", to some degree absent-minded "presence of mind"' (p. 200). Remembrance is a happening that is experienced through the body and in relation to vision.…”

Section: Perhaps It's Not the Place Itself That Matters For When I Ementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Insofar as the experience of fit occurs as a temporality without linear, historical time, it is an experience of flowing and spreading, not one of focused concentration, which results in abstraction. It recalls Hansen's (1987) discussion of Benjamin's 'secularized, profane mode of experience', which she describes in terms of a 'purposeless purposeful drifting into the past which turns the city into a "mnemotechnic device" ' (p. 194). According to Hansen's account, the flâneur's drifting is the potential for remembrance, the flashing of recognition.…”

Section: Perhaps It's Not the Place Itself That Matters For When I Ementioning

confidence: 99%

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It’s all about the Fit: The Hand, the Mobile Screenic Device and Tactile Vision

Cooley¹

2004

Journal of Visual Culture

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This article takes notice of the particular relationship, or fit, between the hand and the mobile screenic device (MSD). Starting with biomechanics and industrial design, it describes the active and responsive quality of this relationship, which enables a manner of seeing that is material and dynamic -tactile. Informed by Benjamin's notion of the tactile, it explains tactile vision as sensual and diffuse and potentially charged with the immediacy and contingency of the everyday. Ultimately, this article asserts that tactile vision, emerging out of fit, provides for a more visceral mode of experiencing the world.

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“…Adorno's microanalyses of literary and musical works demonstrated a dialectical mode of reading that took these works' claims to aesthetic autonomy seriously, while tracing socioeconomic dependency in their very negation of the empirical world. (p. xvi) Adorno does not deny Benjamin's contributions to the experience of understanding the dialectic of medium, author, receiver, and artistic form -without which the immanent analysis of the work of art would fall into mere formalism -but it problematizes the locus of possible resistance that Benjamin believed (especially in the cinema) and in the artistic frontiers opened by them -a possibility that Adorno denies vehemently (Hansen, 1987). Adorno seeks to show how the massive reproduction of art affects not only experience, but also the work of art itself in a structural way.…”

Section: Notes On the Adornian Concept Of Experiencementioning

confidence: 99%

Leitura literária, experiência e formação do indivíduo: reflexões a partir da crítica de Adorno

Dadico

2017

Psicol. USP

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Abstract:The aim of this paper is to discuss the relationship between reading literary books and education [Bildung] inspired by Theodor Adorno's critical contributions. This discussion is guided by the following questions: How does reading books contribute to a cultural education (or pseudoculture)? What is the role of the aesthetic experience in the analysis of a literary work? How might a frame of pseudoculture jeopardize this experience? To guide this examination, I have called upon some of the concepts and aesthetic categories used by Adorno, such as experience, schema, and immanent analysis, as well as his sociological investigations that may contribute to understanding the reading experience. From this perspective, I present some comments on the problems involving reading books and the education of the individual in the current context. Reading books has played a significant role in our cultural history. By providing access to knowledge that is alien to the reader's immediate circle of relationships and helping to consolidate more individualized modes of reading and reflection, books have contributed significantly to the constitution of a modern subjectivity. Integrating themselves intimately with education and culture, books have been associated with the ideals of Enlightenment themselves, becoming a symbol of the bourgeois project of educating the individual: objects capable of nurturing the self-determination of the subject and promoting autonomy. KeywordsThe changes in reading and in the form of the books that appeared in the midst of the digitization of culture over the last decades have made it pertinent to return to the question regarding the critical and/or ideological character present in reading books, as well as on the place of literary reading in a critical project of cultural education.1The purpose of this paper is to discuss, based on the critical contributions of Theodor Adorno, the relationships between the reading of literature books and the cultural education of the individual [Bildung]. This reflection is guided by the following questions: How does reading books participate in the education of the individual (or the halfeducation)? What is the role of aesthetic experience for the analysis of the literary work? How can a half-educational picture compromise this experience?In order to conduct this reflection, I will recover some aesthetic concepts and categories present in Adornian thought, such as those of experience, schema and immanent analysis, as well as sociological research from Adorno that is capable of contributing to a characterization of the reading experience. From this perspective, I propose a reflection on the problems that involve the reading of books and the cultural education of the individual in the current context.

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Benjamin, Cinema and Experience: "The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology"

Cited by 182 publications

References 0 publications

Seeing/Loving Animals: André Bazin's Posthumanism

Seeing/Loving Animals: André Bazin's Posthumanism

It’s all about the Fit: The Hand, the Mobile Screenic Device and Tactile Vision

Leitura literária, experiência e formação do indivíduo: reflexões a partir da crítica de Adorno

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