The Haptic Quality of Film: Walter Benjamin And Film Phenomenology

In “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” Walter Benjamin characterizes film spectatorship as an embodied and sensuous experience. As such, his notion of embodied spectatorship aligns with contemporary theories in film phenomenology that emphasize the role of the body in film experience. Benjamin borrows the term “taktisch” from Alois Riegl to refer to a type of reception that emphasizes tactile qualities through optical means. The term has been controversial in Benjamin studies. The editors of the Gesammelte Schriften considered the word baffling and used taktil instead, whereas Tobias Wilke defends the polysemy of taktisch as both tactile and tactical. Nonetheless, as early as 1902, Riegl discarded the word taktisch as ambiguous and suggested that from then onwards he would use haptisch. This article claims that Benjamin should have used the term haptisch, for it better renders the bodily oriented reception that he detected in cinemas. Haptics has become a widely used concept in film phenomenology, especially since Laura Marks published The Skin of Film to refer to moving images that cannot be apprehended only by sight. Benjamin not only comes close to a similar conception of haptic cinema but also to the proprioceptive qualities of film spectatorship that have been more recently addressed by Scott Richmond. The aim of this article is to introduce Benjamin as a precursor of film phenomenology. First, the article examines how film phenomenology scholars have interpreted and used Benjamin’s work. The central part of the article defends that Benjamin considered that cinema has a “haptic quality” and that, in his conception of film spectatorship, the whole body is involved. Finally, the article contends that Benjamin’s film writings can be considered part of film phenomenology and contribute to current debates about the relationship between the spectator’s body and the film onscreen.