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Walter Benjamin (1892-1940)
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction
XI
The shooting of a film, especially of a sound
film, affords a spectacle unimaginable anywhere at any time before this.
It presents a process in which it is impossible to assign to a spectator
a viewpoint which would exclude from the actual scene such extraneous accessories
as camera equipment, lighting machinery, staff assistants, etc. - unless
his eye were on a line parallel with the lens. This circumstance, more
than any other, renders superficial and insignificant any possible similarity
between a scene in the studio and one on the stage. In the theatre one
is well aware of the place from which the play cannot immediately be detected
as illusionary. There is no such place for the movie 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 result of a special procedure, namely, the shooting
by the specially adjusted camera and the mounting of the shot together
with other similar ones. The equipment-free aspect of reality here has
become the height 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 theatre, 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 magician.
The magician heals a sick person by the laying on of hands; the surgeon
cuts into the patient's body. The magician maintains the natural distance
between the patient and himself; though he reduces it very slightly by
the laying on of hands, he greatly increases it by virtue of his authority.
The surgeon does exactly the reverse; he greatly diminishes the distance
between himself and the patient by penetrating into the patient's body,
and increases it but little by the caution with which his hand moves among
the organs. In short, in contrast to the magician - who is still hidden
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 work a natural distance from reality,
the cameraman penetrates deeply into its web. There is a tremendous difference
between 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 contemporary man the representation of reality by
the film is incomparably more significant than that of the painter, since
it 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. |