Page 164 - Darko Štrajn, From Walter Benjamin to the End of Cinema: Identities, Illusion and Signification. Ljubljana: Educational Research Institute, 2017. Digital Library, Dissertationes, 29.
P. 164
from walter benjamin to the end of cinema
ic category of a productive subjective activity, through which differences
that are in many respects defined as cultural attributes, contribute to the
self-recognition of the subject in the process of forming the identity. In this
activity the subject triumphs over history as well, or in other words, the (ab-
stract) subject’s freedom is manifested also in his freedom from the deter-
minations of history. However, this triumph happens to be an illusory im-
position of the subject: history, as a rule, strikes back in a form of “events”.
In any case, films reacted to a correlation with history especially through
their reflexive approach to identity. Therefore, we can say that there are
common features between different approaches to identity in the Europe-
an cinema in different periods. The notion of identity concerns a number
of its enunciations that touch upon philosophical subjectivity, psychologi-
cal subject, an ethnic entity, the political agent, and so on. All these differ-
ent aspects of identity, which are naturally in most cases, but not necessar-
ily so, inscribed in constructions of fictional characters, are manifested in
films from different periods of European cinematography.
European Modernity: Decentring Identity
Modernist movements of the 1960s and 1970s, as I hinted at the beginning
of this chapter, addressed the theme of identity in an ideologically sub-
versive manner. Among many definitions of ideology, I am choosing here
a very minimalist one, which joins a representation of reality and a sys-
tem of domination. This subsequently means that a subject (person, citi-
zen, man, woman, etc.) is defined within an order, which includes economy
and morality, culture and education, politics and media, sports and traf-
fic, language and religion and many more such conceptual pairs or oppo-
sitions. As the period of post-war prosperity on the both sides of the iron
curtain opened a space for a new self-definition of younger generations, a
great number of the European films of the period addressed the position of
individual in a society in a manner, which uncovered the illusory stability
of the world. These films addressed the so-called alienation,4 they opened
a view on social inequalities and poverty in a world supposedly without
poverty, and they contributed to the decentred ideas of order in a man-
ner that ironically paralleled the absurdist theatre. All these messages and
4 The notion of alienation was largely used at the time in the intellectual discourses of
existentialism and in some trends within the New Left, especially those, which were
discovering the “young Marx” and which worked with ideas of the critical theory of
the Frankfurt school. The term alienation itself could be a starting point for taking a
deconstructive view of the period.
162
ic category of a productive subjective activity, through which differences
that are in many respects defined as cultural attributes, contribute to the
self-recognition of the subject in the process of forming the identity. In this
activity the subject triumphs over history as well, or in other words, the (ab-
stract) subject’s freedom is manifested also in his freedom from the deter-
minations of history. However, this triumph happens to be an illusory im-
position of the subject: history, as a rule, strikes back in a form of “events”.
In any case, films reacted to a correlation with history especially through
their reflexive approach to identity. Therefore, we can say that there are
common features between different approaches to identity in the Europe-
an cinema in different periods. The notion of identity concerns a number
of its enunciations that touch upon philosophical subjectivity, psychologi-
cal subject, an ethnic entity, the political agent, and so on. All these differ-
ent aspects of identity, which are naturally in most cases, but not necessar-
ily so, inscribed in constructions of fictional characters, are manifested in
films from different periods of European cinematography.
European Modernity: Decentring Identity
Modernist movements of the 1960s and 1970s, as I hinted at the beginning
of this chapter, addressed the theme of identity in an ideologically sub-
versive manner. Among many definitions of ideology, I am choosing here
a very minimalist one, which joins a representation of reality and a sys-
tem of domination. This subsequently means that a subject (person, citi-
zen, man, woman, etc.) is defined within an order, which includes economy
and morality, culture and education, politics and media, sports and traf-
fic, language and religion and many more such conceptual pairs or oppo-
sitions. As the period of post-war prosperity on the both sides of the iron
curtain opened a space for a new self-definition of younger generations, a
great number of the European films of the period addressed the position of
individual in a society in a manner, which uncovered the illusory stability
of the world. These films addressed the so-called alienation,4 they opened
a view on social inequalities and poverty in a world supposedly without
poverty, and they contributed to the decentred ideas of order in a man-
ner that ironically paralleled the absurdist theatre. All these messages and
4 The notion of alienation was largely used at the time in the intellectual discourses of
existentialism and in some trends within the New Left, especially those, which were
discovering the “young Marx” and which worked with ideas of the critical theory of
the Frankfurt school. The term alienation itself could be a starting point for taking a
deconstructive view of the period.
162
