Walter Benjamin on Cinema: An Object of Human Innervation

This chapter analyzes Benjamin’s film writings—scattered across articles, essays, notes, and letters—as part of ongoing concerns in his philosophy. The author argues that Benjamin’s writings on cinema should be understood as part of his anthropological materialism. Benjamin understood that cinema was a medium in which humans could rehearse a non-instrumental relationship with technology, adapting it to the collective body that was formed in the arena of film spectatorship and, in the very process, transforming the human sensorium. The result of such an understanding was a theory that addressed the aesthetics of cinema as being informed not only through visual perception, but with the whole body, prefiguring concepts such as haptics and embodied perception that have become central in today’s film scholarship. This chapter analyzes Benjamin’s texts on Soviet cinema, Charlie Chaplin, and Mickey Mouse in the light of his broader ideas about the human body, the innervation of technology, and the possibility of experience in late modernity.