| dc.description.abstract | This project asks why Walter Benjamin regarded film as a revolutionary technology.
Through Picture House and Hansel & Gretel, two `digital objects' I have composed, and
my text, the art of getting lost, I trace the obscure connections among memory, mimesis,
embodied experience, communication, translation, forgotten futures, allegory, and the
(neo)baroque, which Benjamin weaves together in his theory of film. In film's mimetic
nature Benjamin saw a means to (re)educate our abilities to make connections, to stray
from our usual ways of perceiving and to enter into an astonishment that can lead to new
awareness. I argue that in his concept of innervation -an exchange between screen and
skin- Benjamin sees film as producing a semblance of an oral society, one which
privileges memory and embodied communication. Film, I posit, is a site which Benjamin
understood as permitting a recuperation of the sensual; for him it is a time and place
which sutured experience and representation, body and memory. Further, I argue that the
aura Benjamin claimed was stripped away in technological reproduction is in film
actually reproduced as an `afterlife' which is able to touch us in ways that are more than
metaphorical. My own practice picks up on Benjamin's notion that within film there lies
buried what paradoxically he called forgotten futures. My pieces play along one of these
possible tangents, engaging in a baroque cinema of attractions which celebrates artifice
and openendedness. Benjamin, I am arguing, saw the technology of film as performing a
remembrance service, reminding us of the cost of uncritically accepting representations
and misusing technologies. His theories prove as relevant to today, if not more so, as to
the time he wrote them. | en |
