"Another Nature Which Speaks to the Camera": Film and Translation in the Writings of Walter Benjamin

"Another Nature Which Speaks to the Camera":

Film and Translation in the Writings of Walter Benjamin

"The phenomenon of déjà vu has often been described. Is the term really apt? Shouldn't we rather speak of events which affect us like an echo—one awakened by a sound that seems to have issued from somewhere in the darkness of past life?"

Walter Benjamin,Berlin Childhood around 1900

I

What would it mean to read Walter Benjamin's theory of film in conjunction with his writings on language? If upon first glance this question appears unusual, even extravagant, it is because one typically associates film with the visual realm—all theoretical investigations into film sound notwithstanding. Nor does it help matters that scholarship has inadvertently obscured certain continuities running throughout Benjamin's works by separating them into an early "theological" period and a later "Marxist" one. Finally, there is also a sense in which a considerable obstruction to reconsidering Benjamin's theory of film comes from Benjamin himself—specifically from his tendency to invoke the language of pictures, images, and vision ("profane illumination," "dialectical image," and so on).¹ Yet his writings on film and photography, far from breaking with his early works, actually elaborate his initial preoccupations with speech and language; indeed, he arrives at the conclusions in the way that he does as a result of his attempt to think through the implications of these youthful theoretical reflections.

Here some degree of caution is required, since readers searching for evidence of the convergence between language and film in Benjamin's writings will come away disappointed if they limit their investigation to the more predictable places. For example, Benjamin pays scant attention to the phenomenon of film sound, and what few comments he ventures to offer on this topic in "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility" (1935–36) are so implausible as to border on the bizarre (such as his claim that there is a direct correlation between the advent of sound film and the rise of fascism).² In fact, the intersection between language and film in his writings must be sought at those moments that describe the significance of modern visual technologies in terms of their capacity to vocalize the extremities of modern experience, thereby rendering audible (and hence intelligible) what would otherwise remain mute. From this perspective, the revolutionary potential of film and photography does not have to do with how they show the world as such, but with the way in which this showing constitutes a form of speech. Therein consists the truly innovative character of Benjamin's reading, which only becomes apparent after having taken note of how his analysis draws upon a repository of acoustic motifs that are already discernable in earlier, more programmatic essays.³

Taking as their point of departure Benjamin's claim that "it is another nature that speaks to the camera as compared to the eye," the following pages elaborate the affinities between his analysis of film in "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility" and his account of language in "On Language as Such and on the Language of Man" (1916). In doing so it will become apparent that Benjamin's theory of film owes a great deal to his early account regarding the ability of the human language of names to enable the non-human, inanimate world to express itself. This is not to claim that his vocabulary never undergoes any modification during the twenty years that intervene between his essay on language and his essay on film; quite the contrary. Although he initially has recourse to the notion of speechlessness in order to characterize the Fall of Creation, Benjamin subsequently comes to understand this condition as the deleterious effect of modern civilization upon the integrity of tradition. Speechlessness, in other words, becomes symptomatic of the modern...