Cinema, Benjamin, and the allegorical representation of September 11

Critical Quarterly

Volumn 45, Issue 1-2, 2003, Pages 73-84

  Lowenstein, Adam ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61249729206     PISSN: 00111562     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/1467-8705.00473     Document Type: Review

References (14)

1. Jonathan Mandell, 'History is Impatient to Embrace Sept. 11', New York Times, 18 November 2001, AR1, 38
2. See Michiko Kakutani, 'The Age of Irony Isn't Over After All', New York Times, 9 October 2001, E1, E5
3. Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 101-2. Singer does an excellent job tracking the conceptual complexities surrounding attempts to define modernity both within and outside of film studies (including 'the modernity thesis' described below), so I will not rehearse these matters at length here. See esp. 17-35, 101-30
4. David Bordwell, On the History of Film Style (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 141-6
5. Miriam Bratu Hansen, 'The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism', in Reinventing Film Studies, ed. Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams (London: Arnold, 2000), 332
6. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (1925; London: Verso, 1996), 166. Further references will be noted parenthetically by page number and the prefix OD
7. Allegory's alignment with the image of death is also an alignment with the cinema. Despite the shift in historical period from the seventeenth to the twentieth century, such a connection seems well-justified - Benjamin's conception of The Origin of German Tragic Drama as an engagement with art in his own time intertwines with his well-known concern with the cinema as an emblematic expression of, and reaction to, mid-twentieth-century modernity. In fact, The Arcades Project (1927-1940), Benjamin's most ambitious (and unfinished) meditation on modernity, is littered with references to The Origin of German Tragic Drama. See Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999)
8. Walter Benjamin, 'Theses on the Philosophy of History', in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1969), 253-64. Further references will be noted parenthetically by page number and the prefix TH
9. See Tom Gunning, 'The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Its Spectator, and the Avant-garde', Wide Angle, 8 (Fall 1986), 63-70
10. Mark Seltzer, 'Wound Culture: Trauma in the Pathological Public Sphere', October, 80 (Spring 1997), 3
11. See, for example, Andy Seiler, 'Hollywood Goes to War Sooner than Expected', USA Today, 28 November 2001; online, np
12. This incident, like so many others in the film, is taken directly from the source text. See Lt Gen. Harold G. Moore and Joseph L. Galloway, We Were Soldiers Once ... And Young: Ia Drang, the Battle that Changed the War in Vietnam (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), 190-91. In this context, it is worth noting that Randall Wallace is also the screenwriter of Pearl Harbor (Michael Bay, 2001)
13. For a fascinating, related discussion of these terms in another context, see Lauren Berlant, 'The Face of America and the State of Emergency', in The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 175-220
14. See Paul J. Karlstrom, 'Jacob Lawrence: Modernism, Race, and Community', in Over the Line: The Art and Life of Jacob Lawrence, ed. Peter L. Nesbett and Michelle DuBois (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001), 241