Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, and film as an aesthetic medium

This project addresses seven films as explications of the media theory developed by Walter Benjamin in collaboration with Bertolt Brecht. This media theory formulates a framework in which to think about the new status of mechanically reproducible art in the modern, post-World War I, urban environment (mainly Berlin). The first chapter of this project addresses Benjamin's vision of film as the exemplary instance of modern mass media. His film theory is motivated by a desire to articulate and enlist the cinema's potential contribution to social change, and is developed out of Brecht's theory of "didactic" art. I concentrate on the relation between the aesthetic subject and object in order to chart the historical development of these terms in the modern period addressed and experienced by Benjamin and Brecht.; The films I use to illustrate this media theory demonstrate that the paradigm shift towards modern subject/object aesthetic relations is by no means simple, unambiguous, or complete. Instead, the subject/object relations only at certain moments fulfill the political potential in which Benjamin and Brecht invest a good deal of optimism. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)...