Die Physik der Superhelden : James Kakalios zeigt, wie man mit Comics Physik lernt

Rezension zu: James Kakalios : Physik der Superhelden ; Aus dem Amerikanischen von Doris Gerstner und Christoph Hahn, Verlag Rogner & Bernhard bei Zweitausendeins, Berlin 2006, ISBN: 3807710183, 471 Seiten, 29,90 Euro

Late 1920s film theory and criticism as a test-case for Benjamin’s generalizations on the experiential effects of editing

This article investigates Walter Benjamin’s influential generalization that the effects of cinema are akin to the hyper-stimulating experience of modernity. More specifically, I focus on his oft-cited 1935/36 claim that all editing elicits shock-like disruption. First, I propose a more detailed articulation of the experience of modernity understood as hyper-stimulation and call for distinguishing between at least two of its subsets: the experience of speed and dynamism, on the one hand, and the experience of shock/disruption, on the other. Then I turn to classical film theory of the late 1920s to demonstrate the existence of contemporary views on editing alternative to Benjamin’s. For instance, whereas classical Soviet and Weimar theorists relate the experience of speed and dynamism to both Soviet and classical Hollywood style editing, they reserve the experience of shock/disruption for Soviet montage. In order to resolve the conceptual disagreement between these theorists, on the one hand, and Benjamin, on the other, I turn to late 1920s Weimar film criticism. I demonstrate that, contrary to Benjamin’s generalizations about the disruptive and shock-like nature of all editing, and in line with other theorists’ accounts, different editing practices were regularly distinguished by comparison to at least two distinct hyper-stimulation subsets: speed and dynamism, and shock-like disruption. In other words, contemporaries regularly distinguished between Soviet montage and classical Hollywood editing patterns on the basis of experiential effects alone. On the basis of contemporary reviews of city symphonies, I conclude with a proposal for distinguishing a third subset – confusion. This is an original manuscript / preprint of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Early Popular Visual Culture on 02 Aug 2016 available online: https://doi.org/10.1080/17460654.2016.1199322