HSCT 101, Glen Johnson

Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age
of its Technological Reproducibility":
Some suggestive illustrated commentary

In even the most perfect reproduction, one thing is lacking: the here and now of the work of art--its unique existence. [visitors at Lincoln Memorial]

The technological reproduction of artworks is something new. [Poster of Whistler painting for sale.]

The technology of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the sphere of tradition. . . . It substitutes a mass existence for a unique existence.

What withers in the age of the technological reproducibility of the work of art is the latter's aura.

Artworks originated in the service of rituals. . . . The artwork's auratic mode of existence is never entirely severed from its ritual function.

Cult value . . . falls back on a last entrenchment: the human countenance. It is no accident that the portrait is central to early photography. [1850s daguerreotype of Ralph Waldo Emerson.]

As the human being withdraws from the photographic image, exhibition value for the first time shows its superiority to cult value. Atget . . . took photographs of deserted Paris streets. . . . With Atget, photographic records begin to be evidence in the historical trial. . . . Free-floating contemplation is no longer appropriate to them. [Paris photo by Eugene Atget (1856-1927).]

Film responds to the shriveling of the aura by artificially building up the "personality" outside the studio. The cult of the movie star. [1930s photo of Greta Garbo by Clarence Sinclair Bull, MGM.]

In the case of film, the fact that the actor represents someone else before the audience matters much less than the fact that he represents himself before the apparatus. . . . The actor is performing for a piece of equipment. . . . As a result, the aura surrounding the actor is dispelled--and, with it, the aura of the figure he portrays.

The illusory nature of film is of the second degree; it is the result of editing. [Film editor Elizaveta Svilova working on Man with a Movie Camera, as depicted in Man with a Movie Camera.]

The recording apparatus that brings the film actor's performance to the public need not respect the performance as 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 . . . constitutes the completed film. . . . Hence, the performance of the actor is subjected to a series of optical tests. . . . The second consequence is that the film actor lacks the opportunity of the stage actor to adjust to the audience. [Edited shots of Cary Grant in a single scene of Hitchcock's North by Northwest (1959).]

Filmed action lends itself more readily to analysis because it can be isolated more easily. It tends to foster the interpenetration of art and science. [Photographer Eadweard Muybridge's 1878 stop-action photos, which demonstrated for the first time that a galloping horse's four legs are sometimes off the ground simultaneously--something that the unaided human eye cannot detect.]

It is through the camera that we first discover the optical unconscious, just as we discover the instinctual unconscious through psychoanalysis. . . . Film furthers insight into the necessities governing our lives by its use of close-ups, by its accumulation of hidden details in familar objects, and by its exploration of commonplace milieux through the ingenious guidance of the camera. [Cover of a recent academic press book.]

The Dadaists attached much less importance to the commercial usefulness of their artworks than to the uselessness of those works as objects of contemplative immersion. [Above: Fountain by Marcel Duchamp, 1917. Right: Hugo Ball reciting a poem, 1916.])

Contemplative immersion . . . . is here opposed by distraction as a variant of social behavior. . . . Distraction and concentration form an antithesis, which may be formulated as follows. A person who concentrates before a work of art is absorbed by it; he enters into the work. . . . By contrast, the distracted masses absorb the work of art into themselves. [Audiences at classical recital and rock concert.]

Film, by virtue of its shock effects, is predisposed to this form of reception. It makes cult value recede into the background, not only because it encourages an evaluating attitude in the audience but also because, at the movies, the evaluating attitude requires no attention. The audience is an examiner, but a distracted one. [1950s audience watching a 3-D movie.]

Architecture has always offered the prototype of an artwork that is received in a state of distraction and through the collective. [Louvre Museum, Paris]

Humankind, which once, in Homer, was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, has now become one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached the point where it can experience its own annihilation as a supreme aesthetic pleasure. Such is the aestheticizing of politics. [Destruction of Empire State Building in Independence Day (1996)]

The logical outcome of fascism is an aestheticizing of political art. . . . All efforts to aestheticize politics culminate in one point. That one point is war. [1930s German propaganda poster.]