Walter Benjamin and the iPad

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or, Advice for Writers in the Age of Digital Orthography

In his book of aphorisms, One Way Street, published in 1928, Walter Benjamin has a remarkable premonition. ‘The typewriter’ he says, ‘will alienate the hand of the man of letters from the pen only when the precision of typographic forms has directly entered the conception of his books. One might suppose that new systems with more variable typefaces would then be needed. They will replace the pliancy of the hand with the innervation of commanding fingers.’ [p63-4]

This is exactly what started to happen with the advent of the desktop computer six decades later, and with the internet, email and the web, digital command extended into a virtual domain which even a prescient fellow like Benjamin couldn’t have imagined. Read more

Martí according to Pérez

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Screening at the Barbican on September 25, 2010

For his new film on the Cuban national hero Martí, Fernando Pérez has returned to classical narrative after a run of offbeat movies, both fiction and documentary. In Martí, el ojo del canario (Martí: The Eye of the Canary), he reinvents the childhood and adolescence of Cuba’s nineteenth century national hero  José Martí,  covering the years he lived in Cuba before being sent into exile for political sedition at the age of seventeen.  Not a subject to be approached without care, since Martí is a figure, as Guiteras points out on La Joven Cuba, who is adored and put to use by contrary political tendencies to legitimise their own position. Read more

Screen Grabs, Fair Use, and the Digital Economy

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There is continuing confusion about the use of frame grabs for illustrating books and articles about film. It’s a question I get asked regularly, and yesterday there was a query about it on a discussion list I subscribe to, which prompts this post. My understanding is this. Read more

Forthcoming

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Neoliberalism and Global Cinema Capital, Culture, and Marxist Critique
Edited by Jyotsna Kapur, Keith Wagner
 Using film, this study investigates the cultural politics of neoliberalism. Includes Michael Chanan, ‘Cuban Cinema: A Case of Accelerated Underdevelopment’
Forthcoming, Routledge, April 2011

Savvy

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Spent or good deal of time setting this up. The theory is that a new website using my service provider to host WordPress will be easier to maintain and keep up to date than a static site, especially when mobile. But the truth is that for all the bells and whistles, it’s typographically more limited, and you certainly have to think differently about the way it works. For anyone thinking of doing something similar, don’t use Safari – it’s not up to it. I lost a few hours before switching to Firefox, and then it went pretty smoothly, although it was still very finnickity.

Why did I do it? Because when I was checking my web site traffic statistics, which I hadn’t done for a long time, I discovered that it had risen to several thousand hits per month. So thank you, dear reader, for this encouragement, and I hope you find the new version useful.

The main differences from the old site are the redesign, which now includes a news page, and since I’ve been uploading a lot of stuff to Vimeo, the incorporation of lots of video. I expect I’ll add stuff in due course.

Since this is not a blog but a website, comments are disabled. Please send any feedback on the site to <michael(at)mchanan.com>.