#otherss

Despite Benjamin’s explicit equation of filmic shock and montage, it is clear from his theoretical activation of Freud and Proust and his delineation of shock as a surface phenomenon unassimilable to meaning, that the cinema’s shock effect is ineluctably associated with its indexicality, its ability to register or represent contingency. Montage functions for Benjamin not so much to confer order or meaning but to rapidly accumulate and juxtapose contingencies. In this, the film form mimics and displays for the spectator the excesses of a technologically saturated modern life. And, comparing this shock-producing montage to work on the assembly line (where gestures are isolated and disconnected) and to the unretentive and mechanical gestures of gambling (the coup), Benjamin is necessarily ambivalent about the ideological effects of the cinema (a form that both refuses the depth of experiential meaning–Erfahrung–and, at the same time, is a sensitive indicator of and participant in the vast reorganization of subjectivity in modernity). His ambivalence here mirrors that associated with image of contingency as both lure and threat.