New Media and Film History: Walter Benjamin and the Awakening of Cinema

Walter Benjamin's name haunts the current debates about cinema and new media for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the provocative title of his 1936 essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction."¹ We can all agree that we have officially entered a new "age" of reproducibility that has had as profound an effect on global visual culture as film and photography had in Benjamin's day. Whether we want to describe this phase as "electronic," "digital," or "cybernetic," cinema as we have known it has clearly changed and diversified into a host of experiences and perceptual apparatuses that Benjamin would not have recognized. We can speculate on how he might have reconciled the contemporary media scene with his warning against the aestheticization of politics, but it may be too late. The distinction between a politicized aesthetic and an aestheticized politics is hard to discern in a global media landscape in which politics and aesthetics are thoroughly blended.

With the recent publication of four volumes of Benjamin's writings in English, we can now begin to fill in the ellipses and better grasp the ambiguities of this idiosyncratic scholar's cultural theory. In his famous essay on cinema, he does not compare film and art but tries to grasp their respective cultural significance. He may have refused to judge the cinema, but he did, perhaps more directly than any other theorist, attempt to situate it historically; in fact, cinema and photography became his models of historiography, and it is that aspect of his work that I would like to take up here. If "mechanical reproduction" enabled a new means of thinking about history, the electronic media we have come to embrace alongside the rubric "cinema studies" has profoundly altered the ways we think about film history. If for Benjamin cultural history involves an encounter between the past and the present—if the past becomes "legible" only in light of present-tense concerns—new media has enabled us to formulate a redemption of film history that we may take for granted. This electronic recovery of film history nevertheless constitutes a key aspect of what we might mean by cinema and media studies.

New media has altered film history most immediately by making it more accessible. The canon is available at the local video store (and, potentially, in our living rooms via satellite or broadband transmission), while specialized video stores and Internet sources provide access to the vaults of Hollywood and the popular cinemas of many different countries. Scholars and collectors can view material that was once available only to the very few researchers able to travel to remote archives. It is now possible to teach the silent cinema with films that students will actually watch, complete with soundtracks, color tinting, and crisp images projected at the right speed. Even experimental filmmakers like Michael Snow and the late Stan Brakhage—last holdouts of the video invasion—finally gave up their work to the digital interface of the DVD format.² The enhanced image and sound qualities of digital media have stimulated a welcome rerelease of a host of classic and neglected titles that may stimulate a parallel resurgence of film history scholarship. As teachers and scholars, our field has become infinitely enriched because of new technologies that have so greatly increased the dissemination of cinema.

Moreover, there is enormous potential in new media to transform what we do as cinema scholars. Copyright issues notwithstanding, we can use digital versions of film images to illustrate our writing and teaching in innumerable ways. We can add subtitles to bring films from all over the world into our classrooms. The potential for analysis and for communicating about cinema should not be underestimated. Voice-over commentaries on DVDs by directors and other participants in film productions, along with the release of outtakes, alternate endings, and "making-of" documentaries...