The cinema and Walter Benjamin: a discontinuous experience of life

Abstract

This article is an initiative of presenting some elements of Walter Benjamin’s reflections about cinema, and, according to the author, it is an art that give the answers for the modern man perceptive longings, to whom any experience was denied. The cinema, “the work of art in the era of its technical reproduction”, is ultimately for the author the mark of a new perception, of a new relationship between public and the work of art: the collective perception. What the crowd searches is not the contemplation or the withdrawal in front of a work of art, but entertainment. The cinema insists on this characteristic of entertaining when it reproduces the benjaminian concept of “shock experience”, through successive exhibitions of its fragments and constantly interrupting the association of the spectators ideas, (re)affirming the character of amusement of the modern art. However, for the author, the cinema dialectically responds to the amusement as an appropriate instrument for a pedagogy of the crowds – through an emancipated art, the masses would also become emancipated.