Treasures of the Earth and Screen: Todd Haynes's Film Velvet Goldmine

The affinity between Walter Benjamin and contemporary film scholars depends on something deeper than agreement with the theoretical points he makes. Many of his claims, like the link between the evolution of film and the development of socialism, stand on questionable ground. Nonetheless, he uses the experience of film to connect in a vital way with the experience of the reader. More than any other mode of representation, the phenomenon of film in all its aspects mediates a new encounter with our own senses. Where Benjamin finds the consistency of concrete experience changing at its root, he responds with something beyond the abstraction of modified concepts in theory. He constantly looks for ways to make language and the basis of his representations more and more concrete in order to match the unique sensory quality of the modern environment. It is important to recognize in its full significance how he attempts to match the impact of a particular experience by a style of formulations that always contrive to make a strangely direct appeal to the senses, and in this regard, his writing contrives to mimic the rhythm and the impact of images cut, framed, and mounted together in the sequences of cinematography. For example, he does not offer a technical or theoretical definition of how he will use the term “aura” in his essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Instead he conjures up a concrete situation—holding up a twig against the distant line