The contradictions of video collecting

Film Quarterly

Volumn 50, Issue 2, 1997, Pages 11-18

  Tashiro, Charles ^a  

^a USC's Annenberg Center for Communication

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61349165695     PISSN: 00151386     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/1213419     Document Type: Review

References (5)

1. Walter Benjamin, "Unpacking My Library," in Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), pp. 59-67. For example: "... so that you may be ready to share with me a bit of the mood - it is certainly not an elegiac mood but, rather, one of anticipation - which these books arouse in a genuine collector. For such a man is speaking to you, and on closer scrutiny he proves to be speaking only about himself" (59).
2. "For inside [the collector] there are spirits, or at least little genii, which have seen to it that for a collector - and I mean a real collector, a collector as he ought to be - ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them." Benjamin, p. 67.
3. Benjamin described this ordering tendency in book collections in the following terms: For what else is this collection but a disorder to which habit has accommodated itself to such an extent that it can appear as order? ... if there is a counterpart to the confusion of a library, it is the order of its catalogue. Thus there is in the life of a collector a dialectical tension between the poles of disorder and order. Naturally, his existence is tied to many other things as well: to a very mysterious relationship to ownership,... also, to a relationship to objects which does not emphasize their functional, utilitarian value - that is, their usefulness - but studies and loves them as the scene, the stage of their fate. The most profound enchantment for the collector is the locking of individual items within a magic circle in which they are fixed as the final thrill, the thrill of acquisition, passes over them ... for a true collector the whole background of an item adds up to a magic encyclopedia whose quintessence is the fate of his object. Benjamin, pp. 59-60.
4. 'This or any other procedures is merely a dam against the spring tide of memories which surges toward any collector as he contemplates his possession." Benjamin, p. 59.
5. "The book borrower of real stature ... proves himself to be an inveterate collector of books... by his failure to read these books." Benjamin, p. 62.