Walter Benjamin’s Berlin Childhood around 2024: Digital Filmmaking and Multimodal Phenomenality

How might we go about understanding the complicated and ever-shifting nuances of bodily experience, sensory perception, consciousness, and memory, time, and history in our lives and the lives of others? I give thought to this question by reflecting – through the prisms of digital filmmaking – on Walter Benjamin’s autobiographical writings on his childhood in Berlin, as found especially in the posthumously published text, Berliner Kindheit um 1900 (Berlin Childhood around 1900)

Robert Desjarlais is Professor of Anthropology at Sarah Lawrence College in New York, and presently the recipient of a Humboldt Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. He has conducted ethnographic research in several distinct settings, ranging from a homeless shelter in Boston, Massachusetts, to the city of Paris, France. He has also conducted extensive ethnographic research in the Nepal Himalayas with Hyolmo people, an ethnically Tibetan Buddhist people. He is the author of several books, the most recent titled, Traces of Violence: Writings on the Disaster in Paris, France, co-authored with Khalil Habrih (University of California Press, 2022).

April 16 6:15 pm – 7:45 pm April 17 11:15 am – 12:45 pm