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Walter Benjamin (1892-1940)
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction
XIV
One of the foremost tasks of art has always been
the creation of a demand which could be fully satisfied only later. The
history of every art form shows critical epochs in which a certain art
form aspires to effects which could be fully obtained only with a changed
technical standard, that is to say, in a new art form. The extravagances
and crudities of art which thus appear, particularly in the so-called decadent
epochs, actually arise from the nucleus of its richest historical energies.
In recent years, such barbarisms were abundant in Dadaism. It 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 carry beyond its goal. Dadaism did so to the extent that
it sacrificed the market values which are so characteristic of the film
in favour of higher ambitions - though of course it was not conscious of
such intentions as here described. The Dadaists attached much less importance
to the sales value of their work than to its usefulness for contemplative
immersion. The studied degradation of their material was not the least
of their means 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 achieved was a relentless destruction 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 as
one would before a canvas of Derain's or a poem by Rilke. In the decline
of middle-class society, contemplation became a school for asocial behaviour;
it was countered by distraction as a variant of social conduct. Dadaistic
activities actually assured a rather vehement distraction by making works
of art the centre of scandal. One requirement was foremost: to outrage
the public.
From an alluring appearance or persuasive
structure of sound 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. It promoted a demand for the film, the
distracting element of which is also primarily tactile, being based on
changes of place and focus which periodically assail the spectator. Let
us compare the screen on which a film unfolds with the canvas of a painting.
The painting invites the spectator to contemplation; before it 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 changed.
It cannot be arrested. Duhamel, who detests the film 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 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 shock effect of the film, which, like all
shocks, should be cushioned by heightened presence of mind. By means of
its technical structure, the film has taken the physical shock effect out
of the wrappers in which Dadaism had, as it were, kept it inside the moral
shock effect. |