What Question Might You Ask During the ââåevaluateã¢ââ Phase of an Art Critique?
Walter Benjamin (1936)
The Piece of work of Fine art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Source: UCLA Schoolhouse of Theater, Film and Television;
Translated: by Harry Zohn;
Published: past Schocken/Random Business firm, ed. past Hannah Arendt;
Transcribed: past Andy Blunden 1998; proofed and corrected Feb. 2005.
"Our fine arts were developed, their types and uses were established, in times very different from the nowadays, 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 ancient arts and crafts of the Beautiful. In all the arts at that place is a concrete component which can no longer be considered or treated equally it used to exist, which cannot remain unaffected by our modern knowledge and ability. For the last 20 years neither matter nor space nor time has been what it was from fourth dimension immemorial. We must expect great innovations to transform the entire technique of the arts, thereby affecting artistic invention itself and perhaps even bringing about an amazing change in our very notion of art."
Paul Val�ry, Pièces sur L'Art, 1931
Le Conquete de fifty'ubiquite
Preface
When Marx undertook his critique of the capitalistic mode of production, this mode was in its infancy. Marx directed his efforts in such a way as to give them prognostic value. He went back to the basic conditions underlying capitalistic production and through his presentation showed what could exist expected of capitalism in the futurity. The consequence was that one could look information technology not only to exploit the proletariat with increasing intensity, but ultimately to create weather which would make information technology possible to cancel 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 culture the change in the atmospheric condition of product. Just today can it exist indicated what class this has taken. Certain prognostic requirements should exist met past these statements. However, theses most the fine art of the proletariat after its assumption of power or about the art of a classless society would take less bearing on these demands than theses about the developmental tendencies of art under present weather of production. Their dialectic is no less noticeable in the superstructure than in the economic system. It would therefore be wrong to underestimate the value of such theses as a weapon. They brush bated a number of outmoded concepts, such as creativity and genius, eternal value and mystery – concepts whose uncontrolled (and at present almost uncontrollable) application would lead to a processing of data in the Fascist sense. The concepts which are introduced into the theory of fine 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 art.
I
In principle a work of fine art has always been reproducible. Man-made artifacts could always be imitated by men. Replicas were made by pupils in practice of their arts and crafts, past masters for diffusing their works, and, finally, past 3rd parties in the pursuit of gain. Mechanical reproduction of a piece of work of fine art, however, represents something new. Historically, information technology avant-garde intermittently and in leaps at long intervals, but with accelerated intensity. The Greeks knew but two procedures of technically reproducing works of fine art: founding and stamping. Bronzes, terra cottas, and coins were the simply fine art works which they could produce in quantity. All others were unique and could non be mechanically reproduced. With the woodcut graphic art became mechanically reproducible for the kickoff 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. Nevertheless, inside the phenomenon which we are here examining from the perspective of world history, print is merely a special, though particularly of import, instance. During the Middle Ages engraving and carving were added to the woodcut; at the first of the nineteenth century lithography made its appearance. With lithography the technique of reproduction reached an substantially new stage. This much more straight process was distinguished by the tracing of the design on a rock rather than its incision on a block of wood or its etching on a copperplate and permitted graphic art for the start time to put its products on the market, not merely in large numbers as hitherto, just also in daily changing forms. Lithography enabled graphic art to illustrate everyday life, and it began to keep pace with printing. But only a few decades subsequently its invention, lithography was surpassed by photography. For the first time in the process of pictorial reproduction, photography freed the manus of the most important artistic functions which henceforth devolved simply upon the eye looking into a lens. Since the middle perceives more swiftly than the mitt can depict, the procedure of pictorial reproduction was accelerated and then enormously that it could go on pace with speech. A movie operator shooting a scene in the studio captures the images at the speed of an actor'southward speech. Just as lithography virtually unsaid the illustrated paper, then did photography foreshadow the audio film. The technical reproduction of audio was tackled at the terminate of the final century. These convergent endeavors made anticipated a state of affairs which Paul Valery pointed up in this judgement:
"Just as water, gas, and electricity are brought into our houses from far off to satisfy our needs in response to a minimal endeavour, so we shall exist supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear and disappear at a elementary movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign."
Effectually 1900 technical reproduction had reached a standard that not only permitted it to reproduce all transmitted works of art and thus to cause the most profound modify in their impact upon the public; it also had captured a place of its own amid the creative processes. For the study of this standard nothing is more than revealing than the nature of the repercussions that these two unlike manifestations – the reproduction of works of art and the art of the picture – have had on art in its traditional form.
Two
Fifty-fifty the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be. This unique beingness of the work of art adamant the history to which information technology was subject throughout the fourth dimension of its existence. This includes the changes which it may have suffered in concrete condition over the years every bit well as the various changes in its ownership. The traces of the start can be revealed only by chemical or concrete analyses which it is incommunicable to perform on a reproduction; changes of buying are subject 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 authenticity. Chemical analyses of the patina of a statuary can help to establish this, as does the proof that a given manuscript of the Eye Ages stems from an annal of the fifteenth century. The whole sphere of authenticity is outside technical – and, of course, not merely technical – reproducibility. Confronted with its manual reproduction, which was usually branded equally a forgery, the original preserved all its authority; not and so vis-à-vis technical reproduction. The reason is twofold. First, procedure reproduction is more independent of the original than manual reproduction. For case, in photography, process reproduction can bring out those aspects of the original that are unattainable to the naked middle yet accessible to the lens, which is adjustable and chooses its angle at volition. And photographic reproduction, with the aid of certain processes, such as enlargement or slow motion, can capture images which escape natural vision. Secondly, technical reproduction tin can put the copy of the original into situations which would be out of accomplish for the original itself. Above all, information technology enables the original to come across the beholder halfway, exist it in the form of a photograph or a phonograph record. The cathedral leaves its locale to be received in the studio of a lover of art; the choral production, performed in an auditorium or in the open up air, resounds in the cartoon room.
The situations into which the production of mechanical reproduction tin be brought may non touch the actual piece of work of fine art, yet the quality of its presence is always depreciated. This holds non only for the art work merely also, for instance, for a mural which passes in review before the spectator in a movie. In the example of the art object, a most sensitive nucleus – namely, its authenticity – is interfered with whereas no natural object is vulnerable on that score. The authenticity of a affair is the essence of all that is transmissible from its commencement, ranging from its noun duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced. Since the historical testimony rests on the authenticity, the old, as well, is jeopardized by reproduction when substantive duration ceases to matter. And what is really jeopardized when the historical testimony is afflicted is the say-so of the object.
1 might subsume the eliminated element in the term "aura" and go on to say: that which withers in the historic period of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art. This is a symptomatic procedure whose significance points beyond the realm of art. 1 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 meet the beholder or listener in his ain particular situation, information technology reactivates the object reproduced. These two processes lead to a tremendous shattering of tradition which is the obverse of the contemporary crisis and renewal of mankind. Both processes are intimately connected with the gimmicky mass movements. Their nigh powerful agent is the film. Its social significance, peculiarly in its most positive class, is inconceivable without its subversive, cathartic aspect, that is, the liquidation of the traditional value of the cultural heritage. This phenomenon is nearly palpable in the great historical films. Information technology extends to ever new positions. In 1927 Abel Gance exclaimed enthusiastically:
"Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Beethoven volition make films... all legends, all mythologies and all myths, all founders of religion, and the very religions... await their exposed resurrection, and the heroes crowd each other at the gate."
Presumably without intending it, he issued an invitation to a far-reaching liquidation.
III
During long periods of history, the way of homo 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 achieved, is adamant not only past nature but by historical circumstances as well. The fifth century, with its swell shifts of population, saw the nascency of the late Roman fine art manufacture and the Vienna Genesis, and there developed not simply an art different from that of antiquity but too a new kind of perception. The scholars of the Viennese school, Riegl and Wickhoff, who resisted the weight of classical tradition under which these after art forms had been cached, were the first to draw conclusions from them concerning the organization of perception at the time. However far-reaching their insight, these scholars limited themselves to showing the significant, formal hallmark which characterized perception in late Roman times. They did non attempt – and, perhaps, saw no style – to show the social transformations expressed by these changes of perception. The conditions for an analogous insight are more favorable in the present. And if changes in the medium of contemporary perception tin can be comprehended equally decay of the aura, information technology is possible to show its social causes.
The concept of aura which was proposed in a higher place with reference to historical objects may usefully be illustrated with reference to the aura of natural ones. We ascertain the aura of the latter equally the unique phenomenon of a distance, nevertheless shut it may be. If, while resting on a summer afternoon, you follow with your eyes a mount range on the horizon or a branch which casts its shadow over y'all, you experience the aura of those mountains, of that co-operative. This prototype makes it easy to comprehend the social bases of the contemporary decay of the aura. Information technology rests on 2 circumstances, both of which are related to the increasing significance of the masses in contemporary life. Namely, the desire of gimmicky masses to bring things "closer" spatially and humanly, which is but as agog 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 way of its likeness, its reproduction. Unmistakably, reproduction as offered by picture magazines and newsreels differs from the image seen past the unarmed eye. Uniqueness and permanence are equally closely linked in the latter every bit are transitoriness and reproducibility in the former. To pry an object from its shell, 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 even from a unique object past means 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 process of unlimited scope, as much for thinking as for perception.
IV
The uniqueness of a piece of work of art is inseparable from its being imbedded in the fabric of tradition. This tradition itself is thoroughly live and extremely changeable. An ancient statue of Venus, for example, stood in a different traditional context with the Greeks, who made it an object of veneration, than with the clerics of the Middle Ages, who viewed information technology every bit an ominous idol. Both of them, however, were equally confronted with its uniqueness, that is, its aureola. Originally the contextual integration of art in tradition found its expression in the cult. We know that the earliest art works originated in the service of a ritual – showtime the magical, then the religious kind. It is significant that the existence of the work of art with reference to its aureola is never entirely separated from its ritual function. In other words, the unique value of the "authentic" piece of work of fine art has its basis in ritual, the location of its original use value. This ritualistic basis, however remote, is even so recognizable equally secularized ritual fifty-fifty in the most profane forms of the cult of dazzler. The secular cult of beauty, adult during the Renaissance and prevailing for iii centuries, conspicuously showed that ritualistic basis in its decline and the offset deep crisis which befell it. With the advent of the kickoff truly revolutionary ways of reproduction, photography, simultaneously with the ascent of socialism, art sensed the approaching crisis which has become evident a century subsequently. At the fourth dimension, art reacted with the doctrine of fifty'fine art pour l'art, that is, with a theology of art. This gave rise to what might be called a negative theology in the grade of the idea of "pure" fine art, which not merely denied any social role of art but also any categorizing by subject matter. (In poetry, Mallarme was the first to take this position.)
An analysis of art in the historic period of mechanical reproduction must do justice to these relationships, for they lead united states to an all-of import insight: for the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. To an ever greater caste the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility. From a photographic negative, for example, 1 tin make whatever number of prints; to ask for the "authentic" print makes no sense. Simply the instant the criterion of actuality ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the full function of art is reversed. Instead of beingness based on ritual, information technology begins to be based on another exercise – politics.
V
Works of art are received and valued on different planes. 2 polar types stand out; with one, the emphasis is on the cult value; with the other, on the exhibition value of the piece of work. Artistic production begins with ceremonial objects destined to serve in a cult. One may assume that what mattered was their beingness, non their being on view. The elk portrayed by the man of the Stone Age on the walls of his cavern was an musical instrument of magic. He did expose it to his fellow men, just in the principal it was meant for the spirits. Today the cult value would seem to demand that the work of art remain subconscious. Certain statues of gods are attainable simply to the priest in the cella; certain Madonnas remain covered nearly all year round; certain sculptures on medieval cathedrals are invisible to the spectator on ground level. With the emancipation of the various fine art practices from ritual go increasing opportunities for the exhibition of their products. It is easier to exhibit a portrait bust that can be sent here and in that location than to showroom the statue of a divinity that has its fixed identify in the interior of a temple. The same holds for the painting as against the mosaic or fresco that preceded it. And even though the public presentability of a mass originally may have been just equally smashing 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 two poles turned into a qualitative transformation of its nature. This is comparable to the situation of the work of art in prehistoric times when, by the absolute emphasis on its cult value, it was, outset and foremost, an instrument of magic. Only later did it come to be recognized every bit a work of art. In the aforementioned way today, by the absolute accent on its exhibition value the work of fine art becomes a creation with entirely new functions, among which the one we are witting of, the artistic function, later may exist recognized as incidental. This much is certain: today photography and the film are the nigh serviceable exemplifications of this new office.
Six
In photography, exhibition value begins to displace cult value all along the line. But cult value does non give mode without resistance. Information technology retires into an ultimate retrenchment: the human countenance. It is no blow that the portrait was the focal signal 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 last time the aura emanates from the early photographs in the fleeting expression of a human face. This is what constitutes their melancholy, incomparable dazzler. But as human being withdraws from the photographic paradigm, the exhibition value for the beginning time shows its superiority to the ritual value. To have pinpointed this new stage constitutes the incomparable significance of Atget, who, around 1900, took photographs of deserted Paris streets. It has quite justly been said of him that he photographed them like scenes of crime. The scene of a law-breaking, too, is deserted; information technology is photographed for the purpose of establishing evidence. With Atget, photographs become standard bear witness for historical occurrences, and learn a hidden political significance. They demand a specific kind of approach; complimentary-floating contemplation is not appropriate to them. They stir the viewer; he feels challenged by them in a new manner. At the same time picture magazines begin to put up signposts for him, right ones or wrong ones, no thing. For the first time, captions accept go obligatory. And it is clear that they have an altogether unlike character than the title of a painting. The directives which the captions give to those looking at pictures in illustrated magazines soon become even more than explicit and more imperative in the pic where the meaning of each unmarried picture 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, nevertheless; if anything, it underlines it. The dispute was in fact the symptom of a historical transformation the universal affect of which was not realized by either of the rivals. When the historic period of mechanical reproduction separated art from its footing 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 flick. Earlier much futile thought had been devoted to the question of whether photography is an fine art. The primary question – whether the very invention of photography had non transformed the unabridged nature of art – was not raised. Presently the moving picture theoreticians asked the same ill-considered question with regard to the film. But the difficulties which photography caused traditional aesthetics were mere child's play as compared to those raised by the film. Whence the insensitive and forced character of early on theories of the film. Abel Gance, for instance, compares the flick with hieroglyphs: "Hither, past a remarkable regression, we have come back to the level of expression of the Egyptians ... Pictorial language has non withal matured because our eyes have non even so adjusted to it. There is every bit nevertheless insufficient respect for, insufficient cult of, what it expresses." Or, in the words of South�verin-Mars: "What art has been granted a dream more poetical and more existent at the same fourth dimension! Approached in this fashion the pic might represent an incomparable means of expression. Only the nigh loftier-minded persons, in the most perfect and mysterious moments of their lives, should be allowed to enter its ambient." Alexandre Arnoux concludes his fantasy about the silent motion-picture show with the question: "Practice non all the bold descriptions nosotros take given amount to the definition of prayer?" Information technology is instructive to note how their desire to form the picture among the "arts" forces these theoreticians to read ritual elements into it – with a hitting lack of discretion. Yet when these speculations were published, films like L'Opinion publique and The Gold Rush had already appeared. This, however, did non go on Abel Gance from adducing hieroglyphs for purposes of comparison, nor S�verin-Mars from speaking of the moving picture as 1 might speak of paintings by Fra Angelico. Characteristically, even today ultrareactionary authors give the moving picture a similar contextual significance – if not an outright sacred 1, then at least a supernatural one. Commenting on Max Reinhardt's moving-picture show version of A Midsummer Dark'south Dream, Werfel states that undoubtedly information technology was the sterile copying of the outside earth with its streets, interiors, railroad stations, restaurants, motorcars, and beaches which until now had obstructed the pinnacle of the film to the realm of art. "The moving picture has not yet realized its true meaning, its real possibilities ... these consist in its unique faculty to express by natural means and with incomparable persuasiveness all that is fairylike, marvelous, supernatural."
VIII
The artistic performance of a phase thespian is definitely presented to the public by the histrion in person; that of the screen actor, even so, is presented by a camera, with a twofold consequence. The camera that presents the performance of the film actor to the public need non respect the operation as an integral whole. Guided by the cameraman, the photographic camera continually changes its position with respect to the performance. The sequence of positional views which the editor composes from the cloth supplied him constitutes the completed moving-picture show. It comprises certain factors of movement which are in reality those of the camera, non to mention special camera angles, shut-ups, etc. Hence, the operation of the thespian is subjected to a series of optical tests. This is the offset consequence of the fact that the player's performance is presented by means of a camera. Also, the film histrion lacks the opportunity of the phase player to adjust to the audience during his operation, since he does not present his functioning 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'due south identification with the role player is really an identification with the camera. Consequently the audience takes the position of the camera; its arroyo is that of testing. This is non the arroyo to which cult values may be exposed.
IX
For the film, what matters primarily is that the actor represents himself to the public before the camera, rather than representing someone else. I of the first to sense the actor's metamorphosis past this course of testing was Pirandello. Though his remarks on the bailiwick 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 sound film did non change anything essential. What matters is that the office is acted not for an audience but for a mechanical contrivance – in the case of the sound motion picture, for 2 of them. "The film player," wrote Pirandello, "feels as if in exile – exiled non only from the phase merely also from himself. With a vague sense of discomfort he feels inexplicable emptiness: his body loses its corporeality, it evaporates, it is deprived of reality, life, vocalisation, and the noises caused by his moving about, in social club to be inverse into a mute image, 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 photographic camera." This situation might too be characterized as follows: for the showtime time – and this is the upshot of the picture show – man has to operate with his whole living person, yet forgoing its aura. For aureola is tied to his presence; there can exist 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 player vanishes, and with it the aureola of the figure he portrays.
It is non surprising that it should be a dramatist such as Pirandello who, in characterizing the pic, inadvertently touches on the very crisis in which we meet the theater. Any thorough study proves that there is indeed no greater contrast than that of the stage play to a work of art that is completely subject to or, like the moving picture, founded in, mechanical reproduction. Experts accept long recognized that in the film "the greatest furnishings are almost always obtained by 'interim' as little every bit possible ... " In 1932 Rudolf Arnheim saw "the latest trend ... in treating the actor as a stage prop chosen for its characteristics and... inserted at the proper place." With this thought something else is closely connected. The stage actor identifies himself with the character of his role. The film actor very often is denied this opportunity. His cosmos is by no means all of a piece; it is composed of many split up performances. Too certain fortuitous considerations, such as cost of studio, availability of beau players, d�cor, etc., there are elementary necessities of equipment that split the thespian's work into a series of mountable episodes. In detail, lighting and its installation crave the presentation of an event that, on the screen, unfolds equally a rapid and unified scene, in a sequence of separate shootings which may have hours at the studio; not to mention more obvious montage. Thus a bound from the window can be shot in the studio as a bound from a scaffold, and the ensuing flight, if need be, can be shot weeks later when outdoor scenes are taken. Far more than paradoxical cases tin hands be construed. Let us presume that an player is supposed to be startled by a knock at the door. If his reaction is non satisfactory, the manager can resort to an expedient: when the actor happens to be at the studio over again he has a shot fired behind him without his being forewarned of it. The frightened reaction can be shot now and be cut into the screen version. Naught more strikingly shows that art has left the realm of the "beautiful semblance" which, and then far, had been taken to be the but sphere where art could thrive.
Ten
The feeling of strangeness that overcomes the actor earlier the camera, equally Pirandello describes it, is basically of the same kind every bit the estrangement felt before one's ain epitome in the mirror. But now the reflected image has become separable, transportable. And where is it transported? Earlier the public. Never for a moment does the screen thespian end to be conscious of this fact. While facing the photographic camera he knows that ultimately he will face the public, the consumers who plant the marketplace. This market, where he offers not only his labor merely also his whole self, his middle and soul, is beyond his reach. During the shooting he has as little contact with it as whatever article fabricated in a manufacturing plant. This may contribute to that oppression, that new anxiety which, according to Pirandello, grips the actor before the camera. The picture show responds to the shriveling of the aureola with an bogus build-up of the "personality" outside the studio. The cult of the movie star, fostered past the money of the pic industry, preserves not the unique aura of the person only the "spell of the personality," the phony spell of a article. So long as the motion-picture show-makers' capital sets the mode, equally a rule no other revolutionary merit can be accredited to today's film than the promotion of a revolutionary criticism of traditional concepts of fine art. We do not deny that in some cases today's films tin likewise promote revolutionary criticism of social conditions, even of the distribution of holding. However, our present study is no more specifically concerned with this than is the moving picture production of Western Europe.
It is inherent in the technique of the film likewise as that of sports that everybody who witnesses its accomplishments is somewhat of an practiced. This is obvious to anyone listening to a group of paper boys leaning on their bicycles and discussing the consequence of a bike race. It is not for nothing that newspaper publishers suit races for their delivery boys. These arouse peachy interest among the participants, for the victor has an opportunity to rise from delivery boy to professional racer. Similarly, the newsreel offers anybody the opportunity to rise from passer-by to movie extra. In this manner whatever man might even find himself part of a work of art, as witness Vertov's 3 Songs Well-nigh Lenin or Ivens' Borinage. Any man today tin lay claim to being filmed. This merits can best exist elucidated by a comparative look at the historical situation of gimmicky literature.
For centuries a small number of writers were confronted past 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 before the readers, an increasing number of readers became writers – at start, occasional ones. It began with the daily press opening to its readers space for "messages to the editor." And today at that place is hardly a gainfully employed European who could not, in principle, find an opportunity to publish somewhere or other comments on his work, grievances, documentary reports, or that sort of matter. Thus, the distinction betwixt author and public is nigh to lose its basic grapheme. The difference becomes merely functional; it may vary from example to case. At any moment the reader is ready to turn into a writer. As expert, which he had to become willy-nilly in an extremely specialized work process, even if only in some minor respect, the reader gains admission to authorship. In the Soviet Marriage work itself is given a vocalism. To present it verbally is function of a man's ability to perform the work. Literary license is at present founded on polytechnic rather than specialized training and thus becomes mutual property.
All this can easily be practical to the film, where transitions that in literature took centuries have come about in a decade. In cinematic do, particularly in Russia, this alter-over has partially become established reality. Some of the players whom nosotros meet in Russian films are non actors in our sense but people who portray themselves and primarily in their ain work process. In Western Europe the capitalistic exploitation of the film denies consideration to modern man's legitimate merits to being reproduced. Nether these circumstances the film industry is trying hard to spur the interest of the masses through illusion-promoting glasses and dubious speculations.
XI
The shooting of a flick, particularly of a audio picture, affords a spectacle unimaginable anywhere at any time before this. It presents a procedure in which it is impossible to assign to a spectator a viewpoint which would exclude from the actual scene such inapplicable accessories every bit camera equipment, lighting machinery, staff assistants, etc. – unless his heart were on a line parallel with the lens. This circumstance, more than whatever other, renders superficial and insignificant whatever possible similarity between a scene in the studio and 1 on the stage. In the theater one is well enlightened of the place from which the play cannot immediately be detected equally illusionary. There is no such identify for the movie scene that is being shot. Its illusionary nature is that of the 2nd degree, the effect of cutting. That is to say, in the studio the mechanical equipment has penetrated so securely into reality that its pure attribute freed from the foreign substance of equipment is the result of a special procedure, namely, the shooting by the peculiarly adjusted camera and the mounting of the shot together with other similar ones. The equipment-free aspect of reality here has get the acme of artifice; the sight of immediate reality has become an orchid in the land of technology.
Even more revealing is the comparison of these circumstances, which differ so much from those of the theater, with the situation in painting. Hither the question is: How does the cameraman compare with the painter? To reply this we take recourse to an illustration with a surgical functioning. The surgeon represents the polar opposite of the magician. The magician heals a sick person by the laying on of hands; the surgeon cuts into the patient'southward torso. The magician maintains the natural distance between the patient and himself; though he reduces information technology very slightly by the laying on of easily, he profoundly increases it past virtue of his authority. The surgeon does exactly the opposite; he greatly diminishes the altitude between himself and the patient by penetrating into the patient's torso, and increases it but footling 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, it is through the operation that he penetrates into him.
Magician and surgeon compare to painter and cameraman. The painter maintains in his piece of work a natural distance from reality, the cameraman penetrates deeply into its web. There is a tremendous difference betwixt the pictures they obtain. That of the painter is a total one, that of the cameraman consists of multiple fragments which are assembled under a new law. Thus, for gimmicky man the representation of reality by the picture show is incomparably more than significant than that of the painter, since information technology offers, precisely considering of the thoroughgoing permeation of reality with mechanical equipment, an aspect of reality which is costless of all equipment. And that is what one is entitled to ask from a piece of work of art.
XII
Mechanical reproduction of art changes the reaction of the masses toward fine art. The reactionary mental attitude toward a Picasso painting changes into the progressive reaction toward a Chaplin movie. The progressive reaction is characterized past the direct, intimate fusion of visual and emotional enjoyment with the orientation of the expert. Such fusion is of great social significance. The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art course, the sharper the distinction 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 critical and the receptive attitudes of the public coincide. The decisive reason for this is that individual reactions are predetermined past the mass audition response they are about to produce, and this is nowhere more than pronounced than in the picture. The moment these responses become manifest they control each other. Again, the comparison with painting is fruitful. A painting has ever had an excellent chance to be viewed by one person or by a few. The simultaneous contemplation of paintings by a large public, such equally developed in the nineteenth century, is an early on symptom of the crisis of painting, a crisis which was by no means occasioned exclusively by photography merely rather in a relatively independent manner past the appeal of fine art works to the masses.
Painting but is in no position to present an object for simultaneous collective experience, as it was possible for architecture at all times, for the epic poem in the past, and for the moving-picture show today. Although this circumstance in itself should not lead one to conclusions about the social part of painting, it does institute a serious threat as soon as painting, under special conditions and, as it were, against its nature, is confronted direct past the masses. In the churches and monasteries of the Middle Ages and at the princely courts upwardly to the end of the eighteenth century, a collective reception of paintings did not occur simultaneously, but by graduated and hierarchized arbitration. The change that has come about is an expression of the particular conflict in which painting was implicated by the mechanical reproducibility of paintings. Although paintings began to be publicly exhibited in galleries and salons, there was no way for the masses to organize and command themselves in their reception. Thus the same public which responds in a progressive manner toward a grotesque film is bound to respond in a reactionary fashion to surrealism.
XIII
The characteristics of the film lie not only in the mode in which human being presents himself to mechanical equipment merely also in the manner in which, by ways of this appliance, man can stand for his environment. A glance at occupational psychology illustrates the testing capacity of the equipment. Psychoanalysis illustrates it in a different perspective. The flick has enriched our field of perception with methods which can be illustrated by those of Freudian theory. Fifty years ago, a sideslip of the tongue passed more or less unnoticed. Only exceptionally may such a slip accept 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 volume isolated and fabricated analyzable things which had heretofore floated along unnoticed in the broad stream of perception. For the entire spectrum of optical, and now also acoustical, perception the motion picture has brought about a similar deepening of apperception. It is only an obverse of this fact that behavior items shown in a flick can be analyzed much more than 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 assay because of its incomparably more precise statements of the situation. In comparing with the stage scene, the filmed behavior item lends itself more readily to analysis because information technology can exist isolated more than hands. This circumstance derives its chief importance from its tendency to promote the mutual penetration of art and scientific discipline. Actually, of a screened behavior item which is neatly brought out in a certain situation, like a musculus of a body, information technology is difficult to say which is more fascinating, its artistic value or its value for science. To demonstrate the identity of the creative and scientific uses of photography which heretofore usually were separated volition be one of the revolutionary functions of the film.
By close-ups of the things around us, by focusing on hidden details of familiar objects, by exploring common place milieus under the ingenious guidance of the camera, the film, on the one manus, extends our comprehension of the necessities which rule our lives; on the other paw, it manages to assure us of an immense and unexpected field of activeness. 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 film and burst this prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth 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-upward, space expands; with boring motion, movement is extended. The enlargement of a snapshot does not only return more precise what in whatsoever example was visible, though unclear: it reveals entirely new structural formations of the subject. So, besides, slow motion not only presents familiar qualities of motion but reveals in them entirely unknown ones "which, far from looking like retarded rapid movements, give the effect of singularly gliding, floating, supernatural motions." Plainly a different nature opens itself to the photographic camera than opens to the naked middle – if only because an unconsciously penetrated space is substituted for a space consciously explored by man. Even if one has a general knowledge of the mode people walk, one knows nothing of a person's posture during the fractional 2d of a stride. The act 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 photographic 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 u.s. to unconscious eyes as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.
Fourteen
One of the foremost tasks of art has always been the cosmos of a demand which could be fully satisfied merely after. The history of every fine art course shows critical epochs in which a certain fine 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 announced, specially in the so-called decadent epochs, actually arise from the nucleus of its richest historical energies. In contempo years, such barbarisms were abundant in Dadaism. It is merely 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 cosmos of demands will carry across its goal. Dadaism did so to the extent that it sacrificed the marketplace values which are so characteristic of the picture show in favor of higher ambitions – though of form information technology was non witting of such intentions every bit here described. The Dadaists attached much less importance to the sales value of their work than to its uselessness for contemplative immersion. The studied degradation of their material was not the least of their ways to achieve this uselessness. Their poems are "word 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 accomplished was a relentless devastation of the aura of their creations, which they branded as reproductions with the very means of production. Before a painting of Arp's or a poem by August Stramm it is impossible to take time for contemplation and evaluation equally one would before a sheet of Derain'south or a poem by Rilke. In the reject of centre-class society, contemplation became a schoolhouse for asocial behavior; it was countered past distraction as a variant of social conduct. Dadaistic activities actually assured a rather vehement lark by making works of art the center of scandal. 1 requirement was foremost: to outrage the public.
From an alluring appearance or persuasive structure of audio the piece of work of fine art of the Dadaists became an musical instrument of ballistics. Information technology hitting the spectator like a bullet, it happened to him, thus acquiring a tactile quality. Information technology promoted a demand for the film, the distracting chemical element of which is also primarily tactile, being based on changes of place and focus which periodically assault the spectator. Let united states compare the screen on which a film unfolds with the canvas of a painting. The painting invites the spectator to contemplation; before information technology the spectator can abandon himself to his associations. Before the movie frame he cannot do so. No sooner has his eye grasped a scene than it is already inverse. It cannot be arrested. Duhamel, who detests the flick and knows nothing of its significance, though something of its structure, notes this circumstance as follows: "I can no longer think what I want to recall. My thoughts accept been replaced past moving images." The spectator's process of association in view of these images is indeed interrupted by their constant, sudden change. This constitutes the shock effect of the film, which, like all shocks, should be cushioned by heightened presence of listen. By ways of its technical structure, the film has taken the concrete shock result out of the wrappers in which Dadaism had, equally it were, kept it inside the moral stupor effect.
XV
The mass is a matrix from which all traditional behavior toward works of fine art issues today in a new grade. Quantity has been transmuted into quality. The greatly increased mass of participants has produced a change in the mode of participation. The fact that the new style of participation kickoff appeared in a disreputable course must not confuse the spectator. Yet some people have launched spirited attacks against precisely this superficial attribute. Among these, Duhamel has expressed himself in the most radical manner. What he objects to nearly 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 low-cal in the center and awakens no hope other than the ridiculous ane of someday condign a 'star' in Los Angeles." Clearly, this is at lesser the same ancient lament 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 assay of the picture show. A closer await is needed here. Lark and concentration grade polar opposites which may be stated as follows: A human being who concentrates before a piece of work of art is absorbed by it. He enters into this work of art the mode legend tells of the Chinese painter when he viewed his finished painting. In contrast, the distracted mass absorbs the work of art. This is almost obvious with regard to buildings. Architecture has e'er represented the prototype of a work of art the reception of which is consummated past a collectivity in a land of distraction. The laws of its reception are near instructive.
Buildings take been human's companions since primeval times. Many art forms take developed and perished. Tragedy begins with the Greeks, is extinguished with them, and after centuries its "rules" only are revived. The epic verse form, 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 Eye Ages, and nothing guarantees its uninterrupted existence. But the human demand for shelter is lasting. Compages has never been idle. Its history is more ancient than that of whatever other art, and its claim to being a living force has significance in every endeavour to cover the relationship of the masses to fine art. Buildings are appropriated in a twofold mode: past utilize and by perception – or rather, by bear on and sight. Such appropriation cannot be understood in terms of the attentive concentration of a tourist before a famous building. On the tactile side there is no counterpart to contemplation on the optical side. Tactile appropriation is accomplished not and then much by attention as past habit. As regards architecture, addiction determines to a large extent even optical reception. The latter, too, occurs much less through rapt attending than by noticing the object in incidental fashion. This mode of appropriation, developed with reference to architecture, in certain circumstances acquires approved value. For the tasks which face the human being appliance 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, too, can form habits. More than, the ability to primary certain tasks in a country of lark proves that their solution has become a matter of habit. Lark equally provided by fine art presents a covert control of the extent to which new tasks have become soluble by apperception. Since, moreover, individuals are tempted to avoid such tasks, fine art will tackle the about difficult and well-nigh of import ones where it is able to mobilize the masses. Today it does so in the film. Reception in a land of distraction, which is increasing noticeably in all fields of art and is symptomatic of profound changes in apperception, finds in the picture show its true ways of practice. The motion picture with its shock effect meets this fashion of reception halfway. The motion picture makes the cult value recede into the groundwork not but past putting the public in the position of the critic, but also by the fact that at the movies this position requires no attention. The public is an examiner, simply an absent-minded one.
Epilogue
The growing proletarianization of modern human being and the increasing formation 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 salvation in giving these masses non their right, but instead a gamble to express themselves. The masses have a right to modify 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 analogue in the violation of an apparatus which is pressed into the product of ritual values.
All efforts to return politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war. War and war only can ready a goal for mass movements on the largest scale while respecting the traditional property organization. This is the political formula for the situation. The technological formula may be stated every bit follows: But war makes it possible to mobilize all of today'south technical resource while maintaining the property organization. It goes without maxim that the Fascist embodiment of war does not use such arguments. Withal, Marinetti says in his manifesto on the Ethiopian colonial war:
"For twenty-seven years nosotros Futurists take rebelled against the branding of war as anti-aesthetic ... Appropriately we state:... War is beautiful because information technology establishes man's dominion over the subjugated machinery by ways of gas masks, terrifying megaphones, flame throwers, and small tanks. War is beautiful considering it initiates the dreamt-of metalization of the human body. War is beautiful because it enriches a flowering meadow with the fiery orchids of machine guns. War is beautiful because information technology combines the gunfire, the cannonades, the stop-burn, the scents, and the stench of putrefaction into a symphony. War is cute because it creates new architecture, like that of the big tanks, the geometrical germination flights, the smoke spirals from burning villages, and many others ... Poets and artists of Futurism! ... remember these principles of an aesthetics of war and then that your struggle for a new literature and a new graphic art ... may be illumined by them!"
This manifesto has the virtue of clarity. Its formulations deserve to be accepted by dialecticians. To the latter, the aesthetics of today's war appears as follows: If the natural utilization of productive forces is impeded by the property system, the increase in technical devices, in speed, and in the sources of energy will press for an unnatural utilization, and this is constitute in war. The destructiveness of war furnishes proof that order has not been mature enough to contain engineering science every bit its organ, that engineering 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 product – in other words, to unemployment and the lack of markets. Imperialistic state of war is a rebellion of technology which collects, in the form of "human material," the claims to which society has denied its natural materrial. Instead of draining rivers, society directs a man 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 war to supply the artistic gratification of a sense perception that has been changed past engineering science. This is manifestly the consummation of "l'art pour l'fine art." Flesh, which in Homer'due south time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a caste that it tin feel its own destruction every bit an aesthetic pleasance of the first lodge. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art.
Source: https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm
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