Page 106 - Darko Štrajn, From Walter Benjamin to the End of Cinema: Identities, Illusion and Signification. Ljubljana: Educational Research Institute, 2017. Digital Library, Dissertationes, 29.
P. 106
from walter benjamin to the end of cinema
also recall the attitude toward daily life and art articulated in the Dada
movement and in Neue Sachlichkeit, distancing them from Expressionism
and opposing the notions of highbrow artwork. Thus, there is a double ex-
planation for Benjamin’s sentence: montage has to do with evidence of re-
ality and, in the case of the novel Berlin Alexanderplatz, the origin of the
montage principle unmistakably has to be found in film. Therefore, Döb-
lin’s novel should be taken as a clear expression of a mutual relationship be-
tween literature and film, which was inevitably bound to happen. Indeed,
it also happened in a variety of modes and within many individual novels
by various authors such as Heinrich Mann, James Joyce, and John Dos Pas-
sos, to name just a few. Considering Benjamin’s essay The Work of Art in the
Age of Mechanical Reproduction, written a few years later, on the role of re-
production as a founding notion of mass culture of the twentieth century,
it can be assumed that Benjamin’s review of Döblin’s novel points towards
the divide within the notion of culture and aesthetics (meaning the divide
between “auratic” art and mass reproduced art), which was established by
this utmost influential text by Benjamin. In the setting of industrial soci-
ety, film and literature become entangled within the same field of entirely
transformed aesthetic perception and production. The kind of perception
addressed here has been described by Benjamin as “distracted perception”
(Benjamin, 1969: p. 239).
All kinds of paradoxes of realities of social and moral spheres were in-
scribed in the aesthetic paradigms of the traditional novel; illusions and
phantasmatic constructions, represented through characters of narratives,
manifested and expressed subjectivity, which can be discerned at multiple
discursive levels: from the philosophical “post-Hegelian” Marxist abstract
notions of das Subjekt to existentialist and post-structuralist concepts of
subjectivity and objectivity. The crisis of the novel as a form became evi-
dent when the subjectivity – philosophically not legally or socially – ceased
to function as a definable central agency in the real world of the bourgeois
system. What else but a new and powerful reflection of the world in moving
pictures could have had such an impact as to reinvigorate and transform
the very form of the novel, which now had to deal with decentred subjec-
tivity? The encounter between Döblin and Benjamin as well as the interac-
tion between Döblin’s novel and film in the mode of “moving pictures” can
be taken as one of many indicative points from which the literary text and
moving pictures could no longer be considered separately.
104
also recall the attitude toward daily life and art articulated in the Dada
movement and in Neue Sachlichkeit, distancing them from Expressionism
and opposing the notions of highbrow artwork. Thus, there is a double ex-
planation for Benjamin’s sentence: montage has to do with evidence of re-
ality and, in the case of the novel Berlin Alexanderplatz, the origin of the
montage principle unmistakably has to be found in film. Therefore, Döb-
lin’s novel should be taken as a clear expression of a mutual relationship be-
tween literature and film, which was inevitably bound to happen. Indeed,
it also happened in a variety of modes and within many individual novels
by various authors such as Heinrich Mann, James Joyce, and John Dos Pas-
sos, to name just a few. Considering Benjamin’s essay The Work of Art in the
Age of Mechanical Reproduction, written a few years later, on the role of re-
production as a founding notion of mass culture of the twentieth century,
it can be assumed that Benjamin’s review of Döblin’s novel points towards
the divide within the notion of culture and aesthetics (meaning the divide
between “auratic” art and mass reproduced art), which was established by
this utmost influential text by Benjamin. In the setting of industrial soci-
ety, film and literature become entangled within the same field of entirely
transformed aesthetic perception and production. The kind of perception
addressed here has been described by Benjamin as “distracted perception”
(Benjamin, 1969: p. 239).
All kinds of paradoxes of realities of social and moral spheres were in-
scribed in the aesthetic paradigms of the traditional novel; illusions and
phantasmatic constructions, represented through characters of narratives,
manifested and expressed subjectivity, which can be discerned at multiple
discursive levels: from the philosophical “post-Hegelian” Marxist abstract
notions of das Subjekt to existentialist and post-structuralist concepts of
subjectivity and objectivity. The crisis of the novel as a form became evi-
dent when the subjectivity – philosophically not legally or socially – ceased
to function as a definable central agency in the real world of the bourgeois
system. What else but a new and powerful reflection of the world in moving
pictures could have had such an impact as to reinvigorate and transform
the very form of the novel, which now had to deal with decentred subjec-
tivity? The encounter between Döblin and Benjamin as well as the interac-
tion between Döblin’s novel and film in the mode of “moving pictures” can
be taken as one of many indicative points from which the literary text and
moving pictures could no longer be considered separately.
104
