"Walter Benjamin’s Play Room: Where the Future So Eloquently
Nests or What is Cinema Again?"
Technology and Film Scholarship: Experience, Study, History. Amsterdam University Press, 2018

Walter Benjamin's Frequencies & Reverberations: Paracinema, Energy, & Art

Monograph currently under revision for publication with Wilfred Laurier Press.

Benjamin uses cinematic metaphors and allusions to convey many of his core ideas (optical unconscious, profane illumination, memory, the mimetic faculty, the wild montage of Arcades, and his Spielraum, for example). However, these same concerns speak to his preoccupation with the energies of a disregarded latent world, one we have lost touch with, can no longer tune into without recalibrating our sensorium. In the book I trace the reverberations of Benjamin’s thinking about experience as inherently cinematic to a paracinematic practice which focuses on cinema as a philosophical and physiological state, prior to and independent of a technological apparatus. Understanding Benjamin’s project of revelation and recuperation through a paracinematic lens, I argue, is an important aspect of Benjamin’s work which has been overlooked by Benjamin scholars as well as Art and Film Theory.

Photograph courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey.