Hannah Arendt and the iPhone
Modern Technology, Cinema, and Loneliness
Keywords:
Hannah Arendt, film spectatorship, social isolation, political detachment, modern technologyAbstract
This article revisits Hannah Arendt’s 1958 book The Human Condition to propose that many of her contemporary concerns about humanity’s relationship with technology were prescient in describing our twenty-first century lives. It considers the cinema as a social place, a cultural form of expression, and an interpersonal experience as a starting point to explore human interactions (or isolations) in our post-postmodern condition. By referencing the work of Arendt, it proposes that how we engage with film and its narratives have changed radically and perhaps irreversibly, and we can learn a great deal about out political selves from these alterations.
References
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FILMOGRAPHY
Amarcord (Federico Fellini, 1973)
Cinema Paradiso (Giuseppe Tornatore, 1988)
Donny Darko (Richard Kelly, 2001)
Fade to Black (Vernon Zimmerman, 1980)
Goodbye, Dragon Inn (Tasi Ming-liang, 2003)
Hannah and Her Sisters (Woody Allen, 1986)
Le Fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulin (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2001)
Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976)
The Birth of a Nation (D. W. Griffith, 1915)
The Butcher Boy (Neil Jordan, 1997)
The Last Picture Show (Peter Bogdanovich, 1971)
The Long Day Closes (Terence Davies, 1992)
The Wind the Shakes the Barley (Ken Loach, 2006)
Triumph of the Will (Leni Riefenstahl, 1935)
