An unpublished version of Benjamins Poverty of Experience details the new experience-free mentality of the mass audience: Benjamin: It is a type of dreadful and very cheerful cannibal attitude, related to the barbarism of children. One can tell them fairy-tales again, in which the world is as fresh and as new as for children. Best of all filmic fairy-tales. Who could better corroborate experiences like Mickey Mouse has in his films? A Mickey Mouse film might be incomprehensible to the individual, but not to a public. And a Mickey Mouse film can direct a whole public rhythmically. Leslie: The laughter that the films set off can sound inhuman, but, Benjamin notes, perhaps the individual must have an element of inhumanness so that he mass audience, the collective, that was so often inhuman, might become human....Emerging from savageness, Disneys mouse is also its antidote. From Esther Leslies Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory, and the Avant-Garde
Posted on: Sun, 05 Oct 2014 11:08:57 +0000
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