Walter Benjamin's writings on film are scattered across his life, in essays, reviews, notes, diary entries, convolutes, and letters. Despite their differences in length, style, and purpose, all these writings have something in common: They are primarily concerned with—indeed, they attempt to theorize—the changes in the human sensorium sparked by the arrival of film and the shifting relationship this established between technology and the body. This concern, in fact, was not new for Benjamin when he began to address film directly in 1927. He had begun to consider the incorporation of technology into the human body years before, in anthropological texts from the late 1910s and early 1920s. Benjamin's film writings can therefore be considered a continuation of earlier theoretical concerns, although they also represent changes in approach and vocabulary. Whereas his writings on technology and the body in the earlier 1920s sprang from a supposedly metaphysical perspective, those from the late 1920s adopt a more materialist approach. Even though many concepts reappear, they are reformulated to reflect shifting political and historical concerns. I will argue that these concerns about the interaction of body and technology should be examined through Benjamin's notion of ‘anthropological materialism’. Benjamin only introduced the concept fleetingly. However, it epitomizes his interest in the historical changes to the human sensorium ushered in by new technologies. As such, this concept becomes central to understanding the project that lies behind Benjamin's writings on film.