ââåthe Real Function of Art Is to Make Revolution Using Its Own Mediumã¢ââ
Walter Benjamin (1936)
The Piece of work of Fine art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Source: UCLA Schoolhouse of Theater, Film and Television set;
Translated: by Harry Zohn;
Published: by Schocken/Random House, ed. by Hannah Arendt;
Transcribed: by Andy Blunden 1998; proofed and corrected February. 2005.
"Our fine arts were developed, their types and uses were established, in times very different from the present, by men whose power of activeness upon things was insignificant in comparison with ours. But the amazing growth of our techniques, the adaptability and precision they accept attained, the ideas and habits they are creating, make it a certainty that profound changes are impending in the aboriginal craft of the Beautiful. In all the arts in that location is a concrete component which can no longer be considered or treated as it used to be, which cannot remain unaffected by our modern knowledge and power. For the last xx years neither matter nor space nor time has been what it was from time immemorial. We must expect keen innovations to transform the entire technique of the arts, thereby affecting artistic invention itself and mayhap even bringing about an amazing alter in our very notion of art."
Paul Val�ry, Pièces sur L'Art, 1931
Le Conquete de l'ubiquite
Preface
When Marx undertook his critique of the capitalistic style of production, this mode was in its infancy. Marx directed his efforts in such a way every bit to requite them prognostic value. He went back to the basic atmospheric condition underlying capitalistic production and through his presentation showed what could be expected of commercialism in the future. The issue was that i could expect it non only to exploit the proletariat with increasing intensity, but ultimately to create conditions which would get in possible to abolish capitalism itself.
The transformation of the superstructure, which takes place far more slowly than that of the substructure, has taken more than half a century to manifest in all areas of civilization the change in the weather condition of production. Only today tin it exist indicated what form this has taken. Certain prognostic requirements should be met by these statements. Nevertheless, theses about the fine art of the proletariat afterwards its assumption of power or about the fine art of a classless society would accept less bearing on these demands than theses about the developmental tendencies of art under present weather condition of product. Their dialectic is no less noticeable in the superstructure than in the economy. It would therefore be wrong to underestimate the value of such theses as a weapon. They castor aside a number of outmoded concepts, such as inventiveness and genius, eternal value and mystery – concepts whose uncontrolled (and at present nearly uncontrollable) application would atomic number 82 to a processing of data in the Fascist sense. The concepts which are introduced into the theory of art in what follows differ from the more than familiar terms in that they are completely useless for the purposes of Fascism. They are, on the other hand, useful for the formulation of revolutionary demands in the politics of fine art.
I
In principle a piece of work of art has ever been reproducible. Man-made artifacts could always be imitated by men. Replicas were made by pupils in do of their arts and crafts, by masters for diffusing their works, and, finally, by tertiary parties in the pursuit of gain. Mechanical reproduction of a work of art, however, represents something new. Historically, it advanced intermittently and in leaps at long intervals, but with accelerated intensity. The Greeks knew but two procedures of technically reproducing works of art: founding and stamping. Bronzes, terra cottas, and coins were the only fine art works which they could produce in quantity. All others were unique and could not be mechanically reproduced. With the woodcut graphic art became mechanically reproducible for the showtime time, long before script became reproducible by print. The enormous changes which printing, the mechanical reproduction of writing, has brought about in literature are a familiar story. However, inside the phenomenon which we are here examining from the perspective of world history, print is just a special, though particularly important, case. During the Centre Ages engraving and etching were added to the woodcut; at the beginning of the nineteenth century lithography made its appearance. With lithography the technique of reproduction reached an essentially new stage. This much more direct process was distinguished by the tracing of the design on a rock rather than its incision on a cake of wood or its etching on a copperplate and permitted graphic fine art for the first time to put its products on the market, not only in large numbers as hitherto, simply also in daily changing forms. Lithography enabled graphic fine art to illustrate everyday life, and information technology began to keep stride with printing. But only a few decades after its invention, lithography was surpassed by photography. For the first time in the procedure of pictorial reproduction, photography freed the hand of the nearly important artistic functions which henceforth devolved merely upon the eye looking into a lens. Since the eye perceives more swiftly than the mitt can draw, the process of pictorial reproduction was accelerated so enormously that it could continue pace with speech. A film operator shooting a scene in the studio captures the images at the speed of an thespian's speech. Only as lithography most implied the illustrated newspaper, then did photography foreshadow the sound moving-picture show. The technical reproduction of audio was tackled at the end of the last century. These convergent endeavors fabricated predictable a situation which Paul Valery pointed upward in this sentence:
"Just as water, gas, and electricity are brought into our houses from far off to satisfy our needs in response to a minimal effort, so we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear and disappear at a simple movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign."
Around 1900 technical reproduction had reached a standard that not simply permitted it to reproduce all transmitted works of art and thus to cause the nearly profound change in their touch on upon the public; it also had captured a place of its own amid the artistic processes. For the study of this standard null is more revealing than the nature of the repercussions that these ii unlike manifestations – the reproduction of works of art and the art of the film – take had on art in its traditional form.
2
Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one chemical element: its presence in time and space, its unique beingness at the place where it happens to be. This unique existence of the work of art determined the history to which it was bailiwick throughout the time of its being. This includes the changes which it may have suffered in physical condition over the years as well as the diverse changes in its buying. The traces of the first tin be revealed but by chemic or concrete analyses which it is incommunicable to perform on a reproduction; changes of ownership are field of study to a tradition which must be traced from the situation of the original.
The presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of actuality. Chemic analyses of the patina of a statuary tin can help to establish this, as does the proof that a given manuscript of the Middle Ages stems from an archive of the fifteenth century. The whole sphere of authenticity is outside technical – and, of course, non simply technical – reproducibility. Confronted with its manual reproduction, which was normally branded as a forgery, the original preserved all its authorization; not so vis-à-vis technical reproduction. The reason is twofold. First, procedure reproduction is more independent of the original than manual reproduction. For example, in photography, process reproduction can bring out those aspects of the original that are unattainable to the naked eye withal accessible to the lens, which is adjustable and chooses its angle at will. And photographic reproduction, with the aid of sure processes, such equally enlargement or slow motion, can capture images which escape natural vision. Secondly, technical reproduction can put the copy of the original into situations which would be out of accomplish for the original itself. Above all, it enables the original to meet the beholder halfway, be it in the class of a photograph or a phonograph tape. The cathedral leaves its locale to be received in the studio of a lover of art; the choral product, performed in an auditorium or in the open air, resounds in the drawing room.
The situations into which the production of mechanical reproduction can be brought may not touch the actual work of art, still the quality of its presence is always depreciated. This holds non only for the art work but likewise, for example, for a landscape which passes in review before the spectator in a picture show. In the case of the fine art object, a about sensitive nucleus – namely, its authenticity – is interfered with whereas no natural object is vulnerable on that score. The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced. Since the historical testimony rests on the authenticity, the sometime, too, is jeopardized by reproduction when substantive duration ceases to matter. And what is actually jeopardized when the historical testimony is affected is the dominance of the object.
1 might subsume the eliminated element in the term "aureola" and go on to say: that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of fine art. This is a symptomatic process whose significance points across the realm of art. Ane might generalize by saying: the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. And in permitting the reproduction to encounter the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced. These two processes lead to a tremendous shattering of tradition which is the obverse of the gimmicky crisis and renewal of mankind. Both processes are intimately continued with the contemporary mass movements. Their most powerful agent is the film. Its social significance, specially in its about positive class, is inconceivable without its destructive, cathartic attribute, that is, the liquidation of the traditional value of the cultural heritage. This phenomenon is nearly palpable in the great historical films. It extends to e'er new positions. In 1927 Abel Gance exclaimed enthusiastically:
"Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Beethoven will make films... all legends, all mythologies and all myths, all founders of organized religion, and the very religions... await their exposed resurrection, and the heroes crowd each other at the gate."
Presumably without intending information technology, he issued an invitation to a far-reaching liquidation.
III
During long periods of history, the fashion of man sense perception changes with humanity's entire mode of existence. The manner in which human sense perception is organized, the medium in which information technology is accomplished, is adamant not only past nature but by historical circumstances as well. The 5th century, with its great shifts of population, saw the nascence of the belatedly Roman art industry and the Vienna Genesis, and there developed not merely an art different from that of antiquity but as well a new kind of perception. The scholars of the Viennese school, Riegl and Wickhoff, who resisted the weight of classical tradition under which these later art forms had been buried, were the first to describe conclusions from them concerning the organisation of perception at the fourth dimension. Yet far-reaching their insight, these scholars express themselves to showing the significant, formal hallmark which characterized perception in tardily Roman times. They did not attempt – and, mayhap, saw no mode – to prove the social transformations expressed past these changes of perception. The conditions for an analogous insight are more favorable in the present. And if changes in the medium of gimmicky perception can be comprehended as disuse of the aura, it is possible to testify its social causes.
The concept of aura which was proposed above with reference to historical objects may usefully be illustrated with reference to the aura of natural ones. Nosotros define the aura of the latter as the unique phenomenon of a altitude, however close it may be. If, while resting on a summer afternoon, you follow with your optics a mountain range on the horizon or a branch which casts its shadow over you, you experience the aura of those mountains, of that branch. This image makes it easy to comprehend the social bases of the contemporary decay of the aura. It rests on two circumstances, both of which are related to the increasing significance of the masses in contemporary life. Namely, the desire of contemporary masses to bring things "closer" spatially and humanly, which is just equally ardent every bit their bent toward overcoming the uniqueness of every reality by accepting its reproduction. Every day the urge grows stronger to go hold of an object at very close range by mode of its likeness, its reproduction. Unmistakably, reproduction as offered by picture magazines and newsreels differs from the image seen by the unarmed eye. Uniqueness and permanence are as closely linked in the latter as are transitoriness and reproducibility in the former. To pry an object from its beat, to destroy its aura, is the mark of a perception whose "sense of the universal equality of things" has increased to such a degree that it extracts it fifty-fifty from a unique object past ways of reproduction. Thus is manifested in the field of perception what in the theoretical sphere is noticeable in the increasing importance of statistics. The adjustment of reality to the masses and of the masses to reality is a procedure of unlimited scope, as much for thinking as for perception.
Iv
The uniqueness of a work of art is inseparable from its being imbedded in the cloth of tradition. This tradition itself is thoroughly alive and extremely changeable. An ancient statue of Venus, for case, stood in a different traditional context with the Greeks, who made it an object of veneration, than with the clerics of the Centre Ages, who viewed it as an ominous idol. Both of them, however, were equally confronted with its uniqueness, that is, its aura. Originally the contextual integration of fine art in tradition constitute its expression in the cult. We know that the earliest art works originated in the service of a ritual – starting time the magical, and then the religious kind. It is pregnant that the existence of the piece of work of art with reference to its aura is never entirely separated from its ritual function. In other words, the unique value of the "authentic" work of art has its basis in ritual, the location of its original use value. This ritualistic basis, notwithstanding remote, is still recognizable as secularized ritual fifty-fifty in the most profane forms of the cult of beauty. The secular cult of beauty, developed during the Renaissance and prevailing for three centuries, conspicuously showed that ritualistic basis in its reject and the get-go deep crisis which befell it. With the appearance of the start truly revolutionary means of reproduction, photography, simultaneously with the ascent of socialism, art sensed the approaching crunch which has become evident a century later. At the time, fine art reacted with the doctrine of l'art pour 50'art, that is, with a theology of fine art. This gave rise to what might be called a negative theology in the form of the idea of "pure" art, which non only denied any social function of art just also whatever categorizing by subject matter. (In poetry, Mallarme was the start to have this position.)
An analysis of art in the age of mechanical reproduction must do justice to these relationships, for they lead us to an all-important insight: for the first fourth dimension in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. To an e'er greater caste the work of art reproduced becomes the piece of work of fine art designed for reproducibility. From a photographic negative, for instance, ane can make any number of prints; to ask for the "accurate" print makes no sense. But the instant the benchmark of authenticity ceases to be applicative to creative production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, information technology begins to be based on another practice – politics.
Five
Works of art are received and valued on unlike planes. Two polar types stand out; with one, the accent is on the cult value; with the other, on the exhibition value of the piece of work. Creative production begins with ceremonial objects destined to serve in a cult. One may assume that what mattered was their beingness, not their being on view. The elk portrayed past the man of the Stone Age on the walls of his cavern was an instrument of magic. He did expose it to his swain men, but in the chief it was meant for the spirits. Today the cult value would seem to demand that the work of art remain hidden. Certain statues of gods are accessible only to the priest in the cella; certain Madonnas remain covered virtually all twelvemonth circular; certain sculptures on medieval cathedrals are invisible to the spectator on footing level. With the emancipation of the diverse art practices from ritual go increasing opportunities for the exhibition of their products. It is easier to exhibit a portrait bosom that tin be sent here and in that location than to exhibit the statue of a divinity that has its fixed place in the interior of a temple. The same holds for the painting equally confronting the mosaic or fresco that preceded information technology. And even though the public presentability of a mass originally may have been simply as great as that of a symphony, the latter originated at the moment when its public presentability promised to surpass that of the mass.
With the different methods of technical reproduction of a work of art, its fitness for exhibition increased to such an extent that the quantitative shift between its ii poles turned into a qualitative transformation of its nature. This is comparable to the situation of the piece of work of fine art in prehistoric times when, by the absolute emphasis on its cult value, it was, first and foremost, an instrument of magic. But later did it come to be recognized equally a work of fine art. In the same way today, by the absolute emphasis on its exhibition value the work of art becomes a creation with entirely new functions, amid which the one we are witting of, the artistic function, subsequently may be recognized as incidental. This much is sure: today photography and the film are the most serviceable exemplifications of this new function.
VI
In photography, exhibition value begins to displace cult value all along the line. But cult value does not requite style without resistance. It retires into an ultimate retrenchment: the homo eyebrow. It is no accident that the portrait was the focal point of early photography. The cult of remembrance of loved ones, absent or dead, offers a last refuge for the cult value of the picture. For the terminal fourth dimension the aura emanates from the early photographs in the fleeting expression of a human confront. This is what constitutes their melancholy, incomparable dazzler. Only as human withdraws from the photographic image, the exhibition value for the first fourth dimension shows its superiority to the ritual value. To have pinpointed this new stage constitutes the incomparable significance of Atget, who, effectually 1900, took photographs of deserted Paris streets. It has quite justly been said of him that he photographed them similar scenes of crime. The scene of a offense, besides, is deserted; it is photographed for the purpose of establishing evidence. With Atget, photographs become standard evidence for historical occurrences, and acquire a hidden political significance. They demand a specific kind of approach; costless-floating contemplation is not appropriate to them. They stir the viewer; he feels challenged past them in a new mode. At the same time pic magazines begin to put up signposts for him, correct ones or wrong ones, no matter. For the first time, captions have become obligatory. And information technology is clear that they have an altogether different character than the title of a painting. The directives which the captions give to those looking at pictures in illustrated magazines before long go even more explicit and more imperative in the film where the meaning of each unmarried moving-picture show appears to be prescribed past the sequence of all preceding ones.
VII
The nineteenth-century dispute as to the artistic value of painting versus photography today seems devious and confused. This does not diminish its importance, however; if annihilation, information technology underlines information technology. The dispute was in fact the symptom of a historical transformation the universal impact of which was not realized past either of the rivals. When the age of mechanical reproduction separated art from its basis in cult, the semblance of its autonomy disappeared forever. The resulting change in the function of art transcended the perspective of the century; for a long time it even escaped that of the twentieth century, which experienced the development of the film. Earlier much futile thought had been devoted to the question of whether photography is an art. The primary question – whether the very invention of photography had not transformed the entire nature of art – was not raised. Soon the pic theoreticians asked the same ill-considered question with regard to the film. But the difficulties which photography caused traditional aesthetics were mere child'due south play equally compared to those raised by the picture. Whence the insensitive and forced character of early on theories of the motion-picture show. Abel Gance, for instance, compares the picture with hieroglyphs: "Here, by a remarkable regression, nosotros have come back to the level of expression of the Egyptians ... Pictorial language has non yet matured because our eyes accept not yet adjusted to it. At that place is as yet insufficient respect for, insufficient cult of, what it expresses." Or, in the words of S�verin-Mars: "What fine art has been granted a dream more poetical and more real at the same time! Approached in this fashion the film might represent an unequalled ways of expression. Only the most high-minded persons, in the well-nigh perfect and mysterious moments of their lives, should be allowed to enter its ambient." Alexandre Arnoux concludes his fantasy most the silent picture show with the question: "Do not all the bold descriptions we take given amount to the definition of prayer?" It is instructive to note how their desire to grade the flick amidst the "arts" forces these theoreticians to read ritual elements into information technology – with a striking lack of discretion. Notwithstanding when these speculations were published, films like L'Opinion publique and The Aureate Rush had already appeared. This, even so, did not continue Abel Gance from adducing hieroglyphs for purposes of comparison, nor S�verin-Mars from speaking of the moving-picture show as one might speak of paintings by Fra Angelico. Characteristically, fifty-fifty today ultrareactionary authors give the picture a similar contextual significance – if non an outright sacred one, then at least a supernatural i. Commenting on Max Reinhardt's film version of A Midsummer Night's Dream, Werfel states that undoubtedly it was the sterile copying of the exterior earth with its streets, interiors, railroad stations, restaurants, motorcars, and beaches which until now had obstructed the superlative of the flick to the realm of art. "The flick has not yet realized its truthful significant, its existent possibilities ... these consist in its unique kinesthesia to limited by natural means and with incomparable persuasiveness all that is fairylike, marvelous, supernatural."
VIII
The creative performance of a stage actor is definitely presented to the public by the thespian in person; that of the screen thespian, however, is presented by a camera, with a twofold consequence. The photographic camera that presents the performance of the film player to the public demand not respect the performance every bit an integral whole. Guided by the cameraman, the camera continually changes its position with respect to the performance. The sequence of positional views which the editor composes from the material supplied him constitutes the completed film. It comprises certain factors of motility which are in reality those of the camera, not to mention special photographic camera angles, close-ups, etc. Hence, the functioning of the role player is subjected to a series of optical tests. This is the first consequence of the fact that the thespian's functioning is presented by means of a photographic camera. Also, the movie actor lacks the opportunity of the stage histrion to adapt to the audition during his performance, since he does non present his performance to the audience in person. This permits the audience to take the position of a critic, without experiencing any personal contact with the actor. The audience's identification with the actor is actually an identification with the camera. Consequently the audience takes the position of the camera; its approach is that of testing. This is not the arroyo to which cult values may be exposed.
IX
For the motion picture, what matters primarily is that the actor represents himself to the public before the photographic camera, rather than representing someone else. One of the offset to sense the actor'due south metamorphosis past this form of testing was Pirandello. Though his remarks on the subject in his novel Si Gira were limited to the negative aspects of the question and to the silent film only, this hardly impairs their validity. For in this respect, the audio movie did not change annihilation essential. What matters is that the function is acted non for an audition only for a mechanical contrivance – in the case of the sound moving picture, for ii of them. "The picture histrion," wrote Pirandello, "feels as if in exile – exiled not only from the stage simply too from himself. With a vague sense of discomfort he feels inexplicable emptiness: his torso loses its corporeality, information technology evaporates, information technology is deprived of reality, life, voice, and the noises caused by his moving about, in order to be inverse into a mute paradigm, flickering an instant on the screen, then vanishing into silence .... The projector volition play with his shadow before the public, and he himself must be content to play before the camera." This situation might also be characterized as follows: for the first time – and this is the issue of the motion picture – man has to operate with his whole living person, yet forgoing its aureola. For aura is tied to his presence; at that place tin be no replica of it. The aura which, on the stage, emanates from Macbeth, cannot be separated for the spectators from that of the actor. However, the singularity of the shot in the studio is that the camera is substituted for the public. Consequently, the aura that envelops the actor vanishes, and with it the aura of the figure he portrays.
It is not surprising that it should be a dramatist such as Pirandello who, in characterizing the motion-picture show, inadvertently touches on the very crisis in which we run into the theater. Whatever thorough written report proves that there is indeed no greater dissimilarity than that of the phase play to a work of art that is completely discipline to or, similar the picture show, founded in, mechanical reproduction. Experts have long recognized that in the film "the greatest furnishings are about always obtained by 'acting' equally little as possible ... " In 1932 Rudolf Arnheim saw "the latest trend ... in treating the actor as a phase prop called for its characteristics and... inserted at the proper place." With this idea something else is closely continued. The stage thespian identifies himself with the grapheme of his role. The film histrion very often is denied this opportunity. His creation is past no means all of a slice; information technology is composed of many carve up performances. As well certain fortuitous considerations, such as cost of studio, availability of beau players, d�cor, etc., there are uncomplicated necessities of equipment that split the actor's work into a serial of mountable episodes. In particular, lighting and its installation crave the presentation of an issue that, on the screen, unfolds as a rapid and unified scene, in a sequence of split shootings which may accept hours at the studio; not to mention more obvious montage. Thus a jump from the window can be shot in the studio as a jump from a scaffold, and the ensuing flight, if need be, can be shot weeks later when outdoor scenes are taken. Far more paradoxical cases can hands be construed. Allow us assume that an actor is supposed to exist startled by a knock at the door. If his reaction is not satisfactory, the director can resort to an expedient: when the actor happens to be at the studio again he has a shot fired behind him without his beingness forewarned of it. The frightened reaction can be shot at present and be cut into the screen version. Cypher more strikingly shows that art has left the realm of the "beautiful semblance" which, then far, had been taken to exist the simply sphere where art could thrive.
10
The feeling of strangeness that overcomes the actor before the camera, as Pirandello describes information technology, is basically of the same kind as the estrangement felt before one's own image in the mirror. But at present the reflected paradigm has become separable, transportable. And where is information technology transported? Before the public. Never for a moment does the screen role player end to be conscious of this fact. While facing the photographic camera he knows that ultimately he will face the public, the consumers who constitute the market. This market place, where he offers not only his labor but also his whole self, his heart and soul, is across his reach. During the shooting he has every bit petty contact with it equally any article made in a factory. This may contribute to that oppression, that new feet which, according to Pirandello, grips the player before the camera. The film responds to the shriveling of the aura with an bogus build-up of the "personality" outside the studio. The cult of the motion picture star, fostered by the money of the film manufacture, preserves non the unique aura of the person only the "spell of the personality," the phony spell of a commodity. So long as the movie-makers' capital sets the fashion, as a rule no other revolutionary merit can exist accredited to today's film than the promotion of a revolutionary criticism of traditional concepts of fine art. We do non deny that in some cases today's films tin besides promote revolutionary criticism of social conditions, even of the distribution of property. However, our nowadays study is no more specifically concerned with this than is the film production of Western Europe.
It is inherent in the technique of the film too as that of sports that everybody who witnesses its accomplishments is somewhat of an proficient. This is obvious to anyone listening to a group of paper boys leaning on their bicycles and discussing the result of a wheel race. Information technology is not for nothing that paper publishers accommodate races for their commitment boys. These arouse neat involvement among the participants, for the victor has an opportunity to rise from commitment male child to professional racer. Similarly, the newsreel offers everyone the opportunity to rising from passer-by to film extra. In this fashion any homo might fifty-fifty discover himself office of a work of fine art, equally witness Vertov'due south Iii Songs About Lenin or Ivens' Borinage. Any man today can lay claim to beingness filmed. This claim tin best be elucidated by a comparative expect at the historical situation of contemporary literature.
For centuries a small number of writers were confronted by many thousands of readers. This changed toward the end of the last century. With the increasing extension of the press, which kept placing new political, religious, scientific, professional, and local organs earlier the readers, an increasing number of readers became writers – at first, occasional ones. It began with the daily press opening to its readers space for "letters to the editor." And today there is hardly a gainfully employed European who could not, in principle, discover an opportunity to publish somewhere or other comments on his work, grievances, documentary reports, or that sort of thing. Thus, the distinction between author and public is nearly to lose its basic character. The difference becomes but functional; information technology may vary from example to example. At any moment the reader is fix to turn into a writer. As expert, which he had to become willy-nilly in an extremely specialized work procedure, fifty-fifty if merely in some small-scale respect, the reader gains admission to authorship. In the Soviet Union piece of work itself is given a voice. To nowadays it verbally is part of a man'southward power to perform the work. Literary license is at present founded on polytechnic rather than specialized training and thus becomes common property.
All this tin can easily be applied to the film, where transitions that in literature took centuries take come about in a decade. In cinematic practise, particularly in Russia, this change-over has partially become established reality. Some of the players whom we run into in Russian films are not actors in our sense simply people who portray themselves and primarily in their own work process. In Western Europe the capitalistic exploitation of the film denies consideration to modernistic man's legitimate merits to being reproduced. Under these circumstances the film industry is trying hard to spur the interest of the masses through illusion-promoting spectacles and dubious speculations.
XI
The shooting of a motion picture, specially of a sound film, affords a spectacle unimaginable anywhere at whatsoever time before this. It presents a process in which it is incommunicable to assign to a spectator a viewpoint which would exclude from the bodily scene such extraneous accessories as photographic camera equipment, lighting mechanism, staff administration, etc. – unless his eye were on a line parallel with the lens. This circumstance, more than than any other, renders superficial and insignificant any possible similarity between a scene in the studio and one on the stage. In the theater one is well enlightened of the place from which the play cannot immediately exist detected equally illusionary. There is no such place for the flick scene that is being shot. Its illusionary nature is that of the second degree, the result of cutting. That is to say, in the studio the mechanical equipment has penetrated so deeply into reality that its pure aspect freed from the foreign substance of equipment is the effect of a special procedure, namely, the shooting past the specially adjusted camera and the mounting of the shot together with other similar ones. The equipment-free attribute of reality here has become the peak of artifice; the sight of immediate reality has become an orchid in the land of engineering science.
Even more revealing is the comparison of these circumstances, which differ and so much from those of the theater, with the situation in painting. Here the question is: How does the cameraman compare with the painter? To answer this we take recourse to an analogy with a surgical operation. The surgeon represents the polar opposite of the wizard. The wizard heals a sick person by the laying on of hands; the surgeon cuts into the patient'south body. The magician maintains the natural distance between the patient and himself; though he reduces it very slightly past the laying on of easily, he greatly increases it by virtue of his authorization. The surgeon does exactly the contrary; he greatly diminishes the distance between himself and the patient by penetrating into the patient's body, and increases it just niggling by the caution with which his hand moves among the organs. In short, in dissimilarity to the wizard - who is still subconscious in the medical practitioner – the surgeon at the decisive moment abstains from facing the patient man to man; rather, information technology is through the operation that he penetrates into him.
Wizard and surgeon compare to painter and cameraman. The painter maintains in his work a natural distance from reality, the cameraman penetrates securely into its web. In that location is a tremendous difference between the pictures they obtain. That of the painter is a full i, that of the cameraman consists of multiple fragments which are assembled under a new law. Thus, for contemporary human being the representation of reality by the pic is incomparably more significant than that of the painter, since information technology offers, precisely because of the thoroughgoing permeation of reality with mechanical equipment, an aspect of reality which is free of all equipment. And that is what one is entitled to ask from a work of art.
XII
Mechanical reproduction of fine art changes the reaction of the masses toward fine art. The reactionary attitude toward a Picasso painting changes into the progressive reaction toward a Chaplin picture show. The progressive reaction is characterized by the direct, intimate fusion of visual and emotional enjoyment with the orientation of the expert. Such fusion is of not bad social significance. The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the stardom between criticism and enjoyment past the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion. With regard to the screen, the disquisitional and the receptive attitudes of the public coincide. The decisive reason for this is that individual reactions are predetermined by the mass audience response they are about to produce, and this is nowhere more pronounced than in the motion picture. The moment these responses become manifest they control each other. Again, the comparison with painting is fruitful. A painting has always had an excellent chance to be viewed by ane person or by a few. The simultaneous contemplation of paintings by a large public, such as developed in the nineteenth century, is an early symptom of the crisis of painting, a crunch which was by no means occasioned exclusively by photography merely rather in a relatively contained manner by the appeal of art works to the masses.
Painting just is in no position to present an object for simultaneous collective experience, as information technology was possible for architecture at all times, for the epic verse form in the past, and for the movie today. Although this circumstance in itself should not lead i to conclusions about the social role of painting, information technology does institute a serious threat every bit soon equally painting, nether special conditions and, every bit it were, against its nature, is confronted directly by the masses. In the churches and monasteries of the Middle Ages and at the princely courts up to the cease of the eighteenth century, a collective reception of paintings did non occur simultaneously, but by graduated and hierarchized mediation. The change that has come about is an expression of the detail conflict in which painting was implicated past the mechanical reproducibility of paintings. Although paintings began to exist publicly exhibited in galleries and salons, there was no way for the masses to organize and control themselves in their reception. Thus the same public which responds in a progressive style toward a grotesque film is bound to respond in a reactionary manner to surrealism.
13
The characteristics of the motion-picture show lie not simply in the way in which human being presents himself to mechanical equipment but also in the fashion in which, by means of this apparatus, man can represent his environment. A glance at occupational psychology illustrates the testing capacity of the equipment. Psychoanalysis illustrates it in a different perspective. The moving picture has enriched our field of perception with methods which can exist illustrated by those of Freudian theory. Fifty years ago, a slip of the tongue passed more or less unnoticed. Only exceptionally may such a sideslip have revealed dimensions of depth in a conversation which had seemed to be taking its course on the surface. Since the Psychopathology of Everyday Life things have changed. This book isolated and made analyzable things which had heretofore floated along unnoticed in the broad stream of perception. For the unabridged spectrum of optical, and now besides acoustical, perception the movie has brought about a similar deepening of apperception. It is only an obverse of this fact that behavior items shown in a movie can exist analyzed much more precisely and from more points of view than those presented on paintings or on the stage. As compared with painting, filmed beliefs lends itself more than readily to analysis because of its decidedly more than precise statements of the situation. In comparison with the stage scene, the filmed behavior item lends itself more readily to assay considering it can be isolated more easily. This circumstance derives its chief importance from its tendency to promote the mutual penetration of fine art and science. Actually, of a screened behavior item which is neatly brought out in a certain situation, like a muscle of a body, it is difficult to say which is more than fascinating, its creative value or its value for scientific discipline. To demonstrate the identity of the creative and scientific uses of photography which heretofore usually were separated will be 1 of the revolutionary functions of the moving picture.
By close-ups of the things effectually us, by focusing on hidden details of familiar objects, past exploring common place milieus under the ingenious guidance of the camera, the film, on the one mitt, extends our comprehension of the necessities which rule our lives; on the other hand, it manages to clinch us of an immense and unexpected field of activity. Our taverns and our metropolitan streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories appeared to have us locked up hopelessly. Then came the flick and flare-up this prison-globe asunder past the dynamite of the 10th of a second, so that at present, in the midst of its far-flung ruins and debris, we calmly and adventurously go traveling. With the close-up, infinite expands; with slow motion, motility is extended. The enlargement of a snapshot does not merely render more precise what in any example was visible, though unclear: it reveals entirely new structural formations of the subject field. So, too, tiresome motion non only presents familiar qualities of movement but reveals in them entirely unknown ones "which, far from looking like retarded rapid movements, give the effect of singularly gliding, floating, supernatural motions." Plain a different nature opens itself to the camera than opens to the naked eye – if only because an unconsciously penetrated space is substituted for a space consciously explored by homo. Even if one has a general cognition of the way people walk, one knows nothing of a person'southward posture during the fractional 2d of a stride. The human action of reaching for a lighter or a spoon is familiar routine, yet we hardly know what really goes on between hand and metal, not to mention how this fluctuates with our moods. Here the camera intervenes with the resources of its lowerings and liftings, its interruptions and isolations, it extensions and accelerations, its enlargements and reductions. The camera introduces the states to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.
XIV
1 of the foremost tasks of fine art has e'er been the creation of a demand which could exist fully satisfied only later. The history of every fine art form shows critical epochs in which a certain art form aspires to effects which could be fully obtained but with a changed technical standard, that is to say, in a new fine art form. The extravagances and crudities of art which thus appear, particularly in the so-called corrupt epochs, really arise from the nucleus of its richest historical energies. In contempo years, such barbarisms were abundant in Dadaism. Information technology is only now that its impulse becomes discernible: Dadaism attempted to create by pictorial – and literary – means the effects which the public today seeks in the film.
Every fundamentally new, pioneering creation of demands will bear beyond its goal. Dadaism did and so to the extent that it sacrificed the market values which are so characteristic of the flick in favor of college ambitions – though of class information technology was non witting of such intentions as here described. The Dadaists fastened much less importance to the sales value of their work than to its uselessness for wistful immersion. The studied degradation of their material was not the least of their ways to achieve this uselessness. Their poems are "give-and-take salad" containing obscenities and every imaginable waste product of language. The same is true of their paintings, on which they mounted buttons and tickets. What they intended and achieved was a relentless destruction of the aura of their creations, which they branded as reproductions with the very means of production. Earlier a painting of Arp'southward or a poem past August Stramm information technology is impossible to take fourth dimension for contemplation and evaluation every bit one would before a canvas of Derain's or a poem by Rilke. In the reject of middle-class society, contemplation became a schoolhouse for asocial behavior; it was countered by lark as a variant of social conduct. Dadaistic activities actually assured a rather tearing distraction by making works of art the middle of scandal. Ane requirement was foremost: to outrage the public.
From an alluring appearance or persuasive structure of audio the work of art of the Dadaists became an instrument of ballistics. It hit the spectator like a bullet, it happened to him, thus acquiring a tactile quality. Information technology promoted a demand for the film, the distracting element of which is also primarily tactile, being based on changes of identify and focus which periodically set on the spectator. Permit us compare the screen on which a pic unfolds with the canvas of a painting. The painting invites the spectator to contemplation; before it the spectator tin can carelessness himself to his associations. Earlier the motion-picture show frame he cannot exercise and so. No sooner has his eye grasped a scene than it is already changed. Information technology cannot be arrested. Duhamel, who detests the film and knows nada of its significance, though something of its structure, notes this circumstance as follows: "I can no longer think what I want to think. My thoughts have been replaced by moving images." The spectator's process of association in view of these images is indeed interrupted by their constant, sudden change. This constitutes the stupor issue of the picture show, which, like all shocks, should exist cushioned by heightened presence of heed. By means of its technical construction, the film has taken the physical shock effect out of the wrappers in which Dadaism had, as it were, kept information technology inside the moral shock issue.
XV
The mass is a matrix from which all traditional behavior toward works of art issues today in a new form. Quantity has been transmuted into quality. The greatly increased mass of participants has produced a change in the style of participation. The fact that the new mode of participation starting time appeared in a disreputable form must non misfile the spectator. Nonetheless some people have launched spirited attacks against precisely this superficial aspect. Amongst these, Duhamel has expressed himself in the most radical manner. What he objects to well-nigh is the kind of participation which the movie elicits from the masses. Duhamel calls the movie "a pastime for helots, a diversion for uneducated, wretched, worn-out creatures who are consumed by their worries a spectacle which requires no concentration and presupposes no intelligence which kindles no light in the heart and awakens no hope other than the ridiculous one of someday becoming a 'star' in Los Angeles." Clearly, this is at bottom the aforementioned aboriginal complaining that the masses seek distraction whereas art demands concentration from the spectator. That is a commonplace.
The question remains whether it provides a platform for the analysis of the film. A closer wait is needed here. Distraction and concentration form polar opposites which may exist stated as follows: A homo who concentrates earlier a work of art is absorbed by it. He enters into this work of art the way fable tells of the Chinese painter when he viewed his finished painting. In contrast, the distracted mass absorbs the piece of work of art. This is most obvious with regard to buildings. Compages has e'er represented the paradigm of a piece of work of fine art the reception of which is consummated by a collectivity in a land of distraction. The laws of its reception are nearly instructive.
Buildings have been human's companions since primeval times. Many fine art forms have developed and perished. Tragedy begins with the Greeks, is extinguished with them, and after centuries its "rules" but are revived. The ballsy poem, which had its origin in the youth of nations, expires in Europe at the end of the Renaissance. Panel painting is a creation of the Middle Ages, and null guarantees its uninterrupted existence. But the human need for shelter is lasting. Compages has never been idle. Its history is more ancient than that of whatever other fine art, and its claim to being a living force has significance in every attempt to comprehend the relationship of the masses to art. Buildings are appropriated in a twofold mode: by utilize and by perception – or rather, past touch and sight. Such cribbing cannot be understood in terms of the attentive concentration of a tourist before a famous building. On the tactile side in that location is no counterpart to contemplation on the optical side. Tactile appropriation is achieved not so much by attention as by habit. Every bit regards architecture, habit determines to a large extent even optical reception. The latter, too, occurs much less through rapt attention than by noticing the object in incidental fashion. This fashion of appropriation, developed with reference to compages, in certain circumstances acquires canonical value. For the tasks which face the human apparatus of perception at the turning points of history cannot exist solved by optical means, that is, by contemplation, alone. They are mastered gradually by habit, under the guidance of tactile appropriation.
The distracted person, besides, can form habits. More, the ability to master certain tasks in a land of distraction proves that their solution has go a matter of habit. Distraction as provided by art presents a covert control of the extent to which new tasks accept become soluble by apperception. Since, moreover, individuals are tempted to avoid such tasks, art will tackle the most difficult and most important ones where it is able to mobilize the masses. Today it does so in the motion picture. Reception in a state of distraction, which is increasing noticeably in all fields of art and is symptomatic of profound changes in apperception, finds in the film its true ways of exercise. The film with its shock effect meets this mode of reception halfway. The film makes the cult value recede into the background not just past putting the public in the position of the critic, only also by the fact that at the movies this position requires no attending. The public is an examiner, simply an absent one.
Epilogue
The growing proletarianization of modern human and the increasing germination of masses are two aspects of the same process. Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its conservancy in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses accept a right to change holding relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life. The violation of the masses, whom Fascism, with its F�hrer cult, forces to their knees, has its counterpart in the violation of an appliance which is pressed into the production of ritual values.
All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one matter: war. War and war only tin set a goal for mass movements on the largest scale while respecting the traditional property arrangement. This is the political formula for the situation. The technological formula may exist stated as follows: Simply war makes it possible to mobilize all of today's technical resources while maintaining the holding system. It goes without saying that the Fascist apotheosis of war does not employ such arguments. Still, Marinetti says in his manifesto on the Ethiopian colonial war:
"For twenty-vii years nosotros Futurists have rebelled against the branding of war as anti-aesthetic ... Accordingly nosotros state:... War is beautiful because it establishes man'southward dominion over the subjugated mechanism by means of gas masks, terrifying megaphones, flame throwers, and small tanks. War is cute because information technology initiates the dreamt-of metalization of the human trunk. War is beautiful because it enriches a flowering meadow with the fiery orchids of motorcar guns. War is beautiful considering it combines the gunfire, the cannonades, the stop-burn, the scents, and the stench of putrefaction into a symphony. War is beautiful considering information technology creates new architecture, like that of the big tanks, the geometrical formation flights, the smoke spirals from burning villages, and many others ... Poets and artists of Futurism! ... remember these principles of an aesthetics of war then that your struggle for a new literature and a new graphic art ... may exist illumined past them!"
This manifesto has the virtue of clarity. Its formulations deserve to be accepted by dialecticians. To the latter, the aesthetics of today'south state of war appears equally follows: If the natural utilization of productive forces is impeded past the holding arrangement, the increase in technical devices, in speed, and in the sources of energy will printing for an unnatural utilization, and this is found in war. The destructiveness of war furnishes proof that society has not been mature enough to incorporate technology equally its organ, that applied science has not been sufficiently developed to cope with the elemental forces of society. The horrible features of imperialistic warfare are attributable to the discrepancy betwixt the tremendous means of production and their inadequate utilization in the process of production – in other words, to unemployment and the lack of markets. Imperialistic war is a rebellion of technology which collects, in the grade of "man cloth," the claims to which lodge has denied its natural materrial. Instead of draining rivers, society directs a human stream into a bed of trenches; instead of dropping seeds from airplanes, it drops incendiary bombs over cities; and through gas warfare the aura is abolished in a new way.
"Fiat ars – pereat mundus", says Fascism, and, as Marinetti admits, expects state of war to supply the artistic gratification of a sense perception that has been changed by engineering. This is evidently the consummation of "l'fine art pour l'art." Flesh, which in Homer's time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that information technology can experience its own destruction as an artful pleasure of the get-go society. This is the state of affairs of politics which Fascism is rendering artful. Communism responds by politicizing fine art.
Source: https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm
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