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Walter Benjamin (1892-1940)
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction
X
The feeling of strangeness that overcomes the
actor before the camera, as Pirandello describes it, is basically of the
same kind as the estrangement felt before one's own image in the mirror.
But now the reflected image has become separable, transportable. And where
is it transported? Before the public. Never for a moment does the screen
actor cease to be conscious of this fact. While facing the camera he knows
that ultimately he will face the public, the consumers who constitute the
market. This market, where he offers not only his labour but also his whole
self, his heart and soul, is beyond his reach. During the shooting he has
as little contact with it as any article made in a factory. This may contribute
to that oppression, that new anxiety which, according to Pirandello, grips
the actor before the camera. The film responds to the shrivelling of the
aura with an artificial build-up of the 'personality' outside the studio.
The cult of the movie star, fostered by the money of the film industry,
preserves not the unique aura of the person but the 'spell of the personality,'
the phoney spell of a commodity. So long as the movie-makers' capital sets
the fashion, as a rule no other revolutionary merit can be accredited to
today's film than the promotion of a revolutionary criticism of traditional
concepts of art. We do not deny that in some cases today's films can also
promote revolutionary criticism of social conditions, even of the distribution
of property. However, our present 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
as well as that of sports that everybody who witnesses its accomplishments
is somewhat of an expert. This is obvious to anyone listening to a group
of newspaper boys leaning on their bicycles and discussing the outcome
of a bicycle race. It is not for nothing that newspaper publishers arrange
races for their delivery boys. These arouse great interest among the participants,
for the victor has an opportunity to rise from delivery boy to professional
racer. Similarly, the newsreel offers everyone the opportunity to rise
from passer-by to movie extra. In this way any man might even find himself
part of a work of art, as witness Vertofl's Three Songs About Lenin
or Iven's Borinage. Any man today can lay claim to being filmed.
This claim can best be elucidated by a comparative look 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
before 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, find 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 about to lose its basic character. The difference becomes merely functional;
it may vary from case 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 access to authorship. In the Soviet Union work itself is given a
voice. To present it verbally is part of a man's ability to perform the
work. Literary license is now founded on polytechnic rather than specialized
training and thus becomes common property.
All this can easily be applied to the film,
where transitions that in literature took centuries have come about in
a decade. In cinematic practice, particularly in Russia, this change-over
has partially become established reality. Some of the players whom we meet
in Russian films are not actors in our sense but people who portray themselves
and primarily in their own work process. In Western Europe the capitalistic
exploitation of the film denies consideration to modern man's legitimate
claim 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. |