Deviating from Oliver Grau’s notion of the panorama’s
immersive features, this article will discuss the receptive
impact of virtual travel media of the 19th century in a more ambivalent and nuanced manner by employing
two theoretical texts by Walter Benjamin, Clemens Brentano and Heinrich von Kleist. In Berlin Childhood
around 1900 Benjamin draws on and reflects his childhood experience of the Kaiserpanorama in Berlin. Brentano and Kleist’s text elucidates the authors’ ‘strange feeling’ towards Caspar David Friedrich’s painting Monk by the Sea. What both texts share is a fundamental experience of ambivalence regarding the topographies depicted in both media. Other than merely being ‘enchanted’ and taken into a far distant land, it is precisely the mediality of the Kaiserpanorama and the Friedrich painting that provides a more complex experience, oscillating between distance and familiar terrain, between immersion and media reflexivity, between past, present and future. After introducing and discussing both theoretical accounts, I will apply their receptive principles to the analysis of the virtual travel media panorama and early cinema.
type
paper
keywords
immersion, virtual travel, panorama, early cinema, Walter Benjamin, Heinrich von Kleist, Clemens Brentano, Caspar David Friedrich, Heirich von Kleist, Clemens Bretano
copyright
IJFMA 2016 (by-nc-nd)
year
16/12/2016
country
Portugal
place
Film and Media Art Department/ Lusófona University
