Walter Benjamin, film and the ‘anthropological-materialist’ project

This thesis examines Walter Benjamin’s film aesthetics within the framework of his
‘anthropological-materialist’ project. His writings on film are dispersed among
essays, notes and letters and may appear at first sight to be an incoherent collection
of thoughts on film. However, I will try to argue that they form part of the same
philosophical and political project as his ‘anthropological materialism.’ Thus, these
writings sought, first, to analyse the transformation of the human senses brought
about by the appearance of film technology; and secondly, to envisage the possibility
of undoing the alienation of the senses in modernity through that very same
technology in order to, eventually, create a collective body (Kollectivleib) out of the
audience. This project dates back to Benjamin’s anthropological texts from the early
1920s and was central to texts such as One-Way Street, the Surrealism essay and
‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility.’ The
reconfiguration of aesthetics as aisthēsis that takes place in the latter text is analysed
as forming part of this project, in which Benjamin is concerned with the
transformation of the human body according to its interaction with technology.
From this anthropological-materialist perspective, I address from the second chapter
onwards the film figures—directors, actors, characters—and films that most
concerned Benjamin. Thus, I analyse his writings on Soviet film with regard to the
use and conception of technology in the country; the impact of the bungled reception
of technology in Germany upon films from the Weimar Republic and National
Socialism, especially in their representation of mass movements; the rehabilitation of
allegory in the twentieth century with Charlie Chaplin and the possibility of undoing
the numbing of the senses through his gestic and allegorical performance; and,
finally, Mickey Mouse as a representative of the new barbarism that Benjamin
advocated within his critique of bourgeois humanism.