The establishment of the fine arts and their division into various categories go back to a time that differed radically from ours and to people whose power over things and circumstances was minute in comparison with our own. However, the astounding improvements that our resources have undergone in their precision and adaptability will soon confront us with very radical changes indeed in the ancient industry of the beautiful. In all arts there is a physical component that cannot continue to be considered and treated in the same way as before; no longer can it escape the effects of modern knowledge and modern practice. Neither matter nor space nor time is what, up until twenty years ago, it always was. We must be prepared for such profound changes to alter the entire technological aspect of the arts, influencing invention itself as a result, and eventually, it may be, contriving to alter the very concept of art in the most magical fashion.
Paul Valéry, Pièces sur l’art, Paris [undated],
pp. 103–4 (‘La Conquête de l’ubiquité’)
When Marx set out to analyse the capitalist mode of production, that mode of production was in its infancy. Marx so ordered his endeavours that they acquired prognosticative value. Looking back at the basic circumstances of capitalist production, he presented them in such a way as to show what capitalism might be thought capable of in years to come. What emerged was that it might not only be thought capable of increasingly severe exploitation of proletarians; ultimately, it may even bring about conditions in which it can itself be done away with.
The transformation of the superstructure, which proceeds far more slowly than that of the substructure, has taken more than half a century to bring out the change in the conditions of production in all spheres of civilization. Only now can the form that this has assumed be revealed. Of those revelations, certain prognosticative demands need to be made. However, such demands will be met not so much by theses concerning the art of the proletariat after it has seized power, let alone that of the classless society, as by theses concerning how art will tend to develop under current conditions of production. The dialectic of such tendencies makes itself no less apparent in the super-structure than in the economy. It would be wrong, therefore, to underestimate the combative value of such theses. They oust a number of traditional concepts – such as creativity and genius, everlasting value and secrecy – concepts whose uncontrolled (and at the moment scarcely controllable) application leads to a processing of the facts along the lines of Fascism. The following concepts, here introduced into art theory for the first time, differ from more familiar ones in that they are quite useless for the purposes of Fascism. They can, on the other hand, be used to formulate revolutionary demands in the politics of art.
In principle, the work of art has always been reproducible. What man has made, man has always been able to make again. Such copying was also done by pupils as an artistic exercise, by masters in order to give works wider circulation, ultimately by anyone seeking to make money. Technological reproduction of the work of art is something else, something that has been practised intermittently throughout history, at widely separated intervals though with growing intensity. The Greeks had only two processes for reproducing works of art technologically: casting and embossing. Bronzes, terracottas, and coins were the only artworks that they were able to manufacture in large numbers. All the rest were unique and not capable of being reproduced by technological means. It was wood engraving that made graphic art technologically reproducible for the first time; drawings could be reproduced long before printing did the same for the written word. The huge changes that printing (the technological reproducibility of writing) brought about in literature are well known. However, of the phenomenon that we are considering on the scale of history here they are merely a particular instance – though of course a particularly important one. Wood engraving is joined in the course of the Middle Ages by copperplate engraving and etching, then in the early nineteenth century by lithography.
With lithography, reproductive technology reaches a radically new stage. The very much speedier process represented by applying a drawing to a stone as opposed to carving it into a block of wood or etching it on to a copperplate enabled graphic art, for the first time, to market its products not only in great numbers (as previously) but also in different designs daily. Lithography made it possible for graphic art to accompany everyday life with pictures. It started to keep pace with printing. However, in these early days it was outstripped, mere decades after the invention of lithography, by photography. With photography, in the process of pictorial reproduction the hand was for the first time relieved of the principal artistic responsibilities, which henceforth lay with the eye alone as it peered into the lens. Since the eye perceives faster than the hand can draw, the process of pictorial reproduction was so enormously speeded up that it was able to keep pace with speech. The film operator, turning the handle in the studio, captures the images as rapidly as the actor speaks. While in lithography the illustrated magazine was present in essence, in photography it was the sound film. The technological reproduction of sound was tackled at the end of the last [nineteenth] century. These convergent endeavours rendered foreseeable a situation that Paul Valéry described in the sentence: ‘Just as water, gas, and electric power come to us from afar and enter our homes with almost no effort on our part, there serving our needs, so we shall be supplied with pictures or sound sequences that, at the touch of a button, almost a wave of the hand, arrive and likewise depart.’2 Around 1900 technological reproduction had reached a standard at which it had not merely begun to make the totality of traditional artworks its subject, altering their effect in the most profound manner; it had gained a place for itself among artistic modes of procedure. As regards studying that standard, nothing is more revealing than how its twin manifestations – reproduction of the work of art and the new art of cinematography – redound upon art in its traditional form.
Even with the most perfect reproduction, one thing stands out: the here and now of the work of art – its unique existence in the place where it is now. But it is on that unique existence and on nothing else that the history has been played out to which during the course of its being it has been subject. That includes not only the changes it has undergone in its physical structure over the course of time; it also includes the fluctuating conditions of ownership through which it may have passed.3 The trace of the former will be brought to light only by chemical or physical analyses that cannot be carried out on a reproduction; that of the latter forms the object of a tradition, pursuit of which has to begin from the location of the original.
The here and now of the original constitute the abstract idea of its genuineness. Analyses of a chemical nature carried out on the patina of a bronze may help to establish its genuineness; similarly, proof that a particular medieval manuscript stems from a fifteenth-century archive may help to establish its genuineness. The whole province of genuineness is beyond technological (and of course not only technological) reproducibility.4 But whereas in relation to manual reproduction (the product of which was usually branded a forgery of the original) genuineness retains its full authority, in relation to reproduction by technological means that is not the case. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, technological reproduction is more autonomous, relative to the original, than is manual reproduction. In photography, for instance, it is able to place greater emphasis on aspects of the original that can be accessed only by the lens (adjustable and selecting its viewpoint arbitrarily) and not by the human eye, or it is able to employ such techniques as enlargement or slow motion to capture images that are quite simply beyond natural optics. That is the first reason. Secondly, it can also place the copy of the original in situations beyond the reach of the original itself. Above all, it makes it possible for the original to come closer to the person taking it in, whether in the form of a photograph or in that of a gramophone record. A cathedral quits its site to find a welcome in the studio of an art lover; a choral work performed in a hall or in the open air can be heard in a room.
Even if the circumstances into which the technological reproduction of the work of art may be introduced in no way impair the continued existence of the work otherwise, its here and now will in any case be devalued. And if that by no means applies to the work of art alone but also, mutatis mutandis, to a landscape (for instance) that in a film slides past the viewer, as a result of that process a supremely sensitive core in the object of art is affected that no natural object possesses in the same degree of vulnerability. That is its genuineness. The genuineness of a thing is the quintessence of everything about it since its creation that can be handed down, from its material duration to the historical witness that it bears. The latter (material duration and historical witness) being grounded in the former (the thing’s genuineness), what happens in the reproduction, where the former has been removed from human perception, is that the latter also starts to wobble. Nothing else, admittedly; however, what starts to wobble thus is the authority of the thing.5
We can encapsulate what stands out here by using the term ‘aura’. We can say: what shrinks in an age where the work of art can be reproduced by technological means is its aura. The process is symptomatic; its significance points beyond the realm of art. Reproductive technology, we might say in general terms, removes the thing reproduced from the realm of tradition. In making many copies of the reproduction, it substitutes for its unique incidence a multiplicity of incidences. And in allowing the reproduction to come closer to whatever situation the person apprehending it is in, it actualizes what is reproduced. These two processes usher in a mighty upheaval of what is passed on – an upheaval of tradition that is the verso of the current crisis and renewal of mankind. They are intimately bound up with the mass movements of our day. Their most powerful agent is film. Even in its most positive form (indeed, precisely therein) the social significance of film is unthinkable without this destructive, this cathartic side: namely, liquidation of the value of tradition in cultural heritage. This phenomenon is at its most tangible in major historical films. It is drawing more and more positions into its sphere. And when Abel Gance exclaimed excitedly in 1927: ‘Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Beethoven will make films […] All legends, all mythologies and all myths, all founders of religions – all religions, indeed […] await their filmed resurrection, and the heroes are pressing at the gates,’6 he was calling (doubtless without meaning to) for a comprehensive liquidation.
Within major historical periods, along with changes in the overall mode of being of the human collective, there are also changes in the manner of its sense perception. The manner in which human sense perception is organized, the medium in which it occurs, is dictated not only naturally but also historically. The time of the migration of peoples, in which the late-Roman art industry and the Vienna Genesis came into being, had not only a different art than the Ancient World but also a different perception. The scholars of the Vienna School, Riegl and Wickhoff, who rebelled against the weight of the classical tradition beneath which the art of that period lay buried, were the first to hit on the idea of drawing from that tradition inferences regarding the organization of perception in the age when it enjoyed currency. Far-reaching though their findings were, they were limited by the fact that these researchers contented themselves with revealing the formal signature that characterized perception in the late-Roman period. They did not try (and possibly could not even aspire) to reveal the social upheavals that found expression in those changes of perception. So far as the present is concerned, conditions are more favourable to such an insight. And if changes in the medium of perception occurring in our own day may be understood as a fading of aura, the social conditions of that fading can be demonstrated.
Perhaps we should illustrate the term ‘aura’ as proposed above for historical objects by the concept of an ‘aura’ of natural objects. The latter we define as a unique manifestation of a remoteness, however close it may be. Lying back on a summer’s afternoon, gazing at a mountain range on the horizon or watching a branch as it casts its shadow over our reclining limbs, we speak of breathing in the aura of those mountains or that branch. It is not hard, given such a description, to see how much the current fading of aura depends upon social conditions. That fading has to do with two circumstances, both of which are connected with the increasing significance of the masses in present-day life. The fact is: ‘Bringing things closer’ in both spatial and human terms is every bit as passionate a concern of today’s masses7 as their tendency to surmount the uniqueness of each circumstance by seeing it in reproduction. There is no denying that we see evidence every day of the need to apprehend objects in pictures (or rather in copies, in reproductions of pictures) from very close to. And there is no mistaking the difference between the reproduction (such as illustrated papers and weekly news round-ups hold in readiness) and pictures. Uniqueness and duration are as tightly intertwined in the latter as are transience and reiterability in the former. Stripping the object of its sheath, shattering the aura, bear witness to a kind of perception where ‘a sense of similarity in the world’ is so highly developed that, through reproduction, it even mines similarity from what happens only once. For instance, we are starting to see in the visual field what in the field of theory is emerging as the growing importance of statistics. The orientation of reality towards the masses and of the masses towards reality is a process of unbounded consequence not only for thought but also for the way we see things.
The singularity of the work of art is identical with its embeddedness in the context of tradition. Tradition itself is of course something very much alive, something extraordinarily changeable. A classical statue of Venus, for example, occupied a different traditional context for the Greeks, who made of it an object of worship, than for medieval clerics, who saw it as a threatening idol. But what both were equally struck by was its singularity or, to use another word, its aura. The original way in which the work of art was embedded in the context of tradition was through worship. The oldest works of art, as we know, came into being in the service of some ritual – magical at first, then religious. Now it is crucially important that this auratic mode of being of the work of art never becomes completely separated from its ritual function.8 To put it another way: The ‘one-of-a-kind’ value of the ‘genuine’ work of art has its underpinnings in the ritual in which it had its original, initial utility value. No matter how indirectly, this is still recognizable even in the most profane forms of the service of beauty as a secularized rite.9 The profane service of beauty that emerged with the Renaissance and remained significant for three hundred years thereafter did eventually, at the end of that time, following the first major upheaval to assail it, clearly reveal those foundations. What happened was: when, with the advent of the first truly revolutionary means of reproduction, namely photography (simultaneously with the dawn of Socialism), art felt a crisis approaching that after a further century became unmistakable, it reacted with the theory of l’art pour l’art, which constitutes a theology of art. From it there proceeded, in the further course of events, almost a negative theology in the form of the idea of a ‘pure’ art that rejected not only any kind of social function but also any prompting by an actual subject. (In poetry, Mallarmé was the first to reach this position.)
Paying proper attention to these circumstances is indispensable for a view of art that has to do with the work of art in an age when it can be reproduced by technological means. The reason is that they pave the way for what is here the crucial insight: its being reproducible by technological means frees the work of art, for the first time in history, from its existence as a parasite upon ritual. The reproduced work of art is to an ever-increasing extent the reproduction of a work of art designed for reproducibility.10 From a photographic plate, for instance, many prints can be made; the question of the genuine print has no meaning. However, the instant the criterion of genuineness in art production failed, the entire social function of art underwent an upheaval. Rather than being underpinned by ritual, it came to be underpinned by a different practice: politics.
Works of art are received and adopted with different points of emphasis, two of which stand out as being poles of each other. In one case the emphasis is on the work’s cultic value; in the other, on its display value.11, 12 Artistic production begins with images that serve cultic purposes. With such images, presumably, their presence is more important than the fact that they are seen. The elk depicted by the Stone Age man on the walls of his cave is an instrument of magic. Yes, he shows it to his fellows, but it is chiefly targeted at the spirits. Today this cultic value as such seems almost to insist that the work of art be kept concealed: certain god statues are accessible only to the priest in the cella, certain Madonna images remain veiled almost throughout the year, certain carvings on medieval cathedrals cannot be seen by the spectator at ground level. As individual instances of artistic production become emancipated from the context of religious ritual, opportunities for displaying the products increase. The displayability of a portrait bust, which is capable of being sent all over the place, exceeds that of a god statue, whose fixed place is inside the temple. The displayability of the panel painting is greater than that of the mosaic or fresco that preceded it. And if a setting of the mass is not inherently any less displayable than a symphony, nevertheless the symphony emerged at the point in time when it looked like becoming more so than the mass.
With the various methods of reproducing the work of art technologically, this displayability is so enormously increased that, much as in primeval times, the quantitative shift between its two poles switches to a qualitative change in its nature. In primeval times, you see, because of the absolute weight placed on its cultic value, the work of art became primarily an instrument of magic that was only subsequently, one might say, acknowledged to be a work of art. Today, in the same way, because of the absolute weight placed on its display value, the work of art is becoming an image with entirely new functions, of which the one we are aware of, namely the artistic function, stands out as one that may subsequently be deemed incidental.13 This much is certain, that currently photography and its issue, film, provide the most practical implementation of this discovery.
In photography, display value starts to drive cultic value back along the whole line. However, cultic value does not give ground without resistance. It occupies one last ditch, and that is the human face. It is no accident, not at all, that the portrait forms the centre-piece of early photography. In the cult of recalling absent or deceased loves, the cultic value of the image finds its last refuge. In the transient expression of a human countenance in early photographs we catch one final glimpse of aura. It is this aura that gives them their melancholic, matchless beauty. But where the human form withdraws from photography, there for the first time display value gets the better of cultic value. And it is having set the scene for this process to occur that gives Atget, the man who captured so many deserted Parisian streets around 1900, his incomparable significance. Quite rightly it has been said of him that he recorded a street as if it had been a crime scene. This, too, is unpeopled; it is recorded for clues. With Atget, photographs become exhibits in the trial that is history. That is what constitutes their hidden political significance. They already call for a specific reception. Free-floating contemplation is no longer an appropriate reaction here. They unsettle the viewer, who feels obliged to find a specific way of approaching them. At the same time the illustrated journals start to erect signposts, suggesting that way. Right or wrong – no matter. In them the caption first became obligatory. And clearly this possessed a quite different character than the title of a painting. The directives that the viewer of pictures in the illustrated press receives via the caption shortly afterwards become even more precise and imperious in film, where the way in which each individual image is apprehended seems dictated by the sequence of all that have gone before.
The clash fought out during the nineteenth century as painting and photography disputed the artistic merits of their respective products seems muddled and ill-conceived today. However, far from denying its importance, this may actually underline it. The fact is, that clash was the expression of a historical upheaval of which, as such, neither party was aware. The age where art became reproducible by technological means, in setting it free from its cultic roots, extinguished the light of its autonomy for ever. Yet the alteration in the function of art thus engendered dropped from the century’s field of view. And even the succeeding century, the twentieth, which saw the development of film, long remained oblivious to it.
Much wisdom had already been thrown away on deciding whether photography was an art (without asking the prior question: whether, with the invention of photography, the very nature of art had undergone a change), but before long the theoreticians of film were asking a similarly hasty question. However, the problems that photography had presented for traditional aesthetics were child’s play in comparison with what film had in store. Hence the blind violence that marked the beginnings of film criticism. Here is Abel Gance, for instance, likening film to hieroglyphics: ‘This has then brought us, in the wake of a most remarkable return to the past, back to the level of expression of the Egyptians […]. Pictography has not yet reached full maturity for the reason that our eyes are not yet up to it. There is not yet enough respect, not enough cult for what seeks expression through it.’14 Or as Séverin-Mars writes: ‘What art was ever granted a dream that […] was more poetic and at the same time more real! Looked at from that standpoint, film would represent a form of expression entirely beyond compare, and only persons of the noblest way of thinking in the most sublime, most mysterious moments of their careers might be permitted to move within its atmosphere.’15 As for Alexandre Arnoux, he roundly concludes a fantasy on silent film with the question: ‘All the bold descriptions we have made use of here – ought they not without exception to add up to how we define prayer?’16 It is most instructive to see how the endeavour to annex film to ‘art’ requires such critics to throw caution to the winds in reading cultic elements into their subject. And yet, by the time these speculations appeared, such works as A Woman of Paris and The Gold Rush had already been made. That did not stop Abel Gance from invoking his comparison with hieroglyphics, and Séverin-Mars talks of film as one might discuss the paintings of Fra Angelico. What is characteristic is that, still today [i.e., 1936], particularly reactionary writers seek the meaning of film along the same lines, finding it not in the sacred, perhaps, but certainly in the supernatural. When Reinhardt made his [1935] film of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Werfel observed that it was undoubtedly sterile imitation of the external world with its streets, interiors, railway stations, restaurants, cars, and beaches that had hitherto prevented film from soaring into the realms of art. ‘Film has not yet attained its real meaning or seized its true potential […]. These consist in its unique ability to give voice, using natural means in an incomparably persuasive manner, to the fairy-like, the miraculous, the supernatural.’17
The artistic performance of the stage actor [i.e., what he or she does artistically] is presented to the audience by the actor in person; that is obvious. The artistic performance of the screen actor, on the other hand, is presented to the audience via a piece of equipment, a film camera. The latter has two consequences. The apparatus that mediates the performance of the screen actor to the audience is not obliged to respect that performance as a whole. Guided by its operator, the camera comments on the performance continuously. The outcome of that running commentary, which the editor then assembles from material supplied, is the film as finally put together. It includes a certain number of movements that need to be recognized as those of the camera itself – not to mention such special settings as close-ups. The screen actor’s performance thus undergoes a series of optical tests. This is the first consequence of the state of affairs arising out of the fact that the screen actor’s performance is mediated by the camera. The second consequence is that the screen actor, by not presenting his performance to the audience in person, is deprived of the possibility open to the stage actor of adapting that performance to the audience as the show goes on; the cinema audience is being asked to examine and report without any personal contact with the performer intruding. The audience empathizes with the performer only by empathizing with the camera. It thus assumes the camera’s stance: it tests.18 This is not a stance to which cultic values can be exposed.
Film is very much less interested in having the actor portray another person to the audience than in having the actor portray himself to the camera. One of the first people to sense this change in the actor as a result of performance-as-test was Pirandello. It detracts only slightly from the comments he makes in this connection in his novel Shoot that they confine themselves to stressing the negative aspect of the matter. Even less that they relate to silent films. Because the sound film did nothing fundamental to alter things in this respect. The fact remains, the acting concerned is done for a piece of equipment – or, in the case of the sound film, for two. ‘The screen actor,’ Pirandello writes, ‘feels as if exiled. Exiled not only from the stage but from his own person. With dim disquiet he senses the inexplicable emptiness that results from his body becoming a withdrawal symptom, from its dissipating and being robbed of its reality, its life, its voice, and the sounds it makes by moving around, reduced to a mute image that flickers on the screen for an instant, then disappears into thin air […]. The little projector will play his shadow before the audience; and he himself must be content to act in front of the camera.’19 That same state of affairs may be described as follows: for the first time (and it is film that has done this) a person is placed in the position, while operating with his whole being, of having to dispense with the aura that goes with it. For that aura is bound to his here and now; it has no replica. The aura surrounding Macbeth on-stage cannot, for the live audience, be detached from the aura that surrounds the actor playing him. But what is peculiar about filming in the studio is that in the latter situation the audience is replaced by a piece of equipment. The aura surrounding the player must thus be lost – and with it, at the same time, the aura around the character played.
That it should be precisely a dramatist (Pirandello) who instinctively identifies the distinguishing characteristic of film as causing the crisis we see befalling the theatre comes as no surprise. A work of art captured entirely by technological reproduction, indeed (like film) proceeding from it, can have no more direct opposite than live theatre. Every more detailed examination confirms this. Expert observers long since acknowledged that in film ‘it happens almost invariably that the greatest effects are achieved when the least “acting” is done […]. The ultimate development being to treat the actor as a prop that is selected according to type and […] put to use in the right place.’20 There is something else very closely bound up with this. An actor working in the theatre enters into a part. Very often, the screen actor is not allowed to. The latter’s performance is not a single entity; it consists of many individual performances. Along with such incidental considerations as studio hire, availability of partners, setting, and so on, basic mechanical requirements break the screen actor’s performance down into a series of episodes that can then be assembled. One thinks above all of lighting, installing which means that portrayal of a process that appears on the screen as a single rapid sequence of events must be captured in a series of individual shots that may, in the studio, extend over hours. Not to mention more palpable montages. A leap from a window may, in the studio, be filmed as a leap from scaffolding, while the subsequent flight may be filmed weeks later, during an outside shoot. Nor is it difficult to construe even more paradoxical instances. Possibly, following a knock at the door, an actor is asked to start in surprise. His reaction may turn out to be unsatisfactory. In which case the director may resort to arranging, one day when the actor happens to be back in the studio, for a gun to be fired behind him without warning. The shock experienced by the actor at that moment may be captured and later edited into the film. Nothing shows more graphically that art has escaped from the realm of ‘beautiful pretence’, which for so long was deemed the only habitat in which it might thrive.
The actor’s alienation in front of the film camera, as Pirandello describes it, is inherently of the same sort as a person’s feeling of surprise and displeasure when confronted with his mirror-image. Now, however, the reflection can be separated from the person; it has become transportable. And where is it transported to? Before an audience.21 Awareness of this never leaves the screen actor, not for a moment. The screen actor is conscious, all the while he is before the camera, that in the final analysis he is dealing with the audience: the audience of consumers who constitute the market. That market, which he is entering not merely with his labour but with his very presence, his whole physical being, is quite as intangible, so far as he is concerned at the time of the performance dedicated to it, as is any article produced in a factory. Surely that fact is going to heighten the sense of unease engendered by the new fear that, according to Pirandello, comes over the actor facing a film camera? Film’s response to the shrivelling of aura is an artificial inflation of ‘personality’ outside the studio. The cult of stardom promoted by film capital preserves the personal magic that for years has lain solely in the rancid magic of its commodity character. While film capital sets the tone, no other revolutionary service can be ascribed to present-day films in general than that of furthering a revolutionary critique of traditional notions of art. Certainly, in particular instances film today may go beyond that, furthering a revolutionary critique of social conditions, indeed of the property order. But that is no more the burden of the present investigation than it is the burden of film production in Western Europe.
One concomitant of cinematographic technology, as of sporting technology, is that everyone watches the performances displayed as a semi-expert. If you have ever heard a group of newspaper boys, leaning on their bikes, discussing the results of a cycle race, you will have some understanding of this state of affairs. It is with good reason that newspaper publishers organize competitive events for their young delivery staff. These tournaments arouse great interest among participants, the reason being that the victor of such an event has the chance of rising from newspaper boy to racing cyclist. Similarly the weekly newsreel, for example, gives everyone an opportunity to rise from passer-by to film extra. A person may even, in this way, find himself transported into a work of art (think of Vertov’s Three Songs about Lenin or Ivens’s Borinage). All persons today can stake a claim to being filmed. That claim is best illustrated by a glance at the historical situation of literature today.
For centuries the situation in literature was such that a small number of writers faced many thousands of times that number of readers. Then, towards the end of the last century, there came a change. As the press grew in volume, making ever-increasing numbers of new political, religious, scientific, professional, and local organs available to its readership, larger and larger sections of that readership (gradually, at first) turned into writers. It began with the daily newspapers opening their ‘correspondence columns’ to such people, and it has now reached a point where few Europeans involved in the labour process could fail, basically, to find some opportunity or other to publish an experience at work, a complaint, a piece of reporting, or something of the kind. The distinction between writer and readership is thus in the process of losing its fundamental character. That character is becoming a functional one, assuming a different form from one case to the next. The reader is constantly ready to become a writer. As an expert, which for good or ill he must inevitably become in a highly specialized labour process (be it merely an expert in some minor matter), he gains access to authorship. In the Soviet Union, labour itself has a voice. And putting one’s job into words is part of the skill required to perform it. Literary authority is no longer grounded in specialist education but in polytechnic education; it has become common property.22
All of which can easily be translated into terms of film, where shifts that in literature took centuries have occurred within a decade. For in film (particularly as practised in Russia) this sort of shift has already, in places, been accomplished. Some of the actors encountered in Russian films are not actors in our sense but people who portray themselves (and do so primarily through their labour). In Western Europe, capitalist exploitation of film bars modern man’s legitimate claim to be reproduced from being considered. Given such circumstances, the film industry has every interest in arousing the participation of the masses by means of illusory presentations and suggestive speculations.
A film, particularly a sound film, affords the kind of spectacle that was never before conceivable, not at any time nor in any place. It portrays an event that can no longer be assigned to a single standpoint from which things not strictly belonging to the performance process as such (camera, lighting equipment, crew, and so on) would not fall within the spectator’s field of view. (Unless, that is, the pupil of his eye shared the setting of the camera lens.) This fact, more than any other, renders any similarities that may exist between a scene in the film studio and a scene on-stage superficial and quite unimportant. Live theatre is aware as a matter of principle of the point from which what is happening cannot simply be seen through as illusory. When a film is being made, no such point exists. The illusory nature of film is a second-tier nature; it derives from editing. What this means is: In the film studio the camera has penetrated so deeply into reality that the pure aspect of the latter, uncontaminated by the camera, emerges from a special procedure, namely being shot by a piece of photographic equipment specifically adapted for the purpose and afterwards pasted together with other shots of the same kind. The camera-free aspect of reality is here at its most artificial, and the sight of what is actually going on has become the blue flower [of Romanticism] in the land of technology.
The same state of affairs as here contrasts with that obtaining in the theatre can even more revealingly be compared to that which informs painting. In this case the question we need to ask is: how does the cameraman relate to the painter? To answer it, perhaps I may be permitted an auxiliary construction based on the concept of the Operateur [the now-obsolete German term for the film-crew member Benjamin clearly has in mind] as we are familiar with it in connection with surgery. The surgeon constitutes one pole of an arrangement in which the other is occupied by the magician. The stance of the magician healing an invalid by laying-on of hands differs from that of the surgeon performing an operation on that invalid. The magician maintains the natural distance between himself and the patient; to be precise, he reduces it only slightly (by virtue of a laying-on of hands) while increasing it (by virtue of his authority) hugely. The surgeon does the opposite: he reduces the distance between him and the patient a great deal (by actually going inside the latter) and increases it only a little (through the care with which his hand moves among the patient’s organs). In short, unlike the magician (still a latent presence in the medical practitioner), the surgeon abstains at the crucial moment from facing his invalid person to person, invading him surgically instead.
Magician and surgeon act like painter and cameraman. The painter, while working, observes a natural distance from the subject; the cameraman, on the other hand, penetrates deep into the subject’s tissue.23 The images they both come up with are enormously different. The painter’s is an entity, the cameraman’s chopped up into a large number of pieces, which find their way back together by following a new law. That is why the filmic portrayal of reality is of such incomparably greater significance to people today, because it continues to provide the camera-free aspect of reality that they are entitled to demand of a work of art precisely by using the camera to penetrate that reality so thoroughly.
The fact that the work of art can now be reproduced by technological means alters the relationship of the mass to art. From being very backward (faced with a Picasso, for instance), it has become highly progressive (given, say, Chaplin). Yet this progressive response is characterized by the fact that in it the pleasure of looking and experiencing is associated, directly and profoundly, with the stance of passing an expert judgement. The link is an important social indicator. In fact, the more the social significance of an art diminishes, the greater the extent (as is clearly turning out to be the case with painting) to which the critical and pleasure-seeking stances of the public diverge. The conventional is enjoyed without criticism, the truly new is criticized with aversion. In the cinema, the critical and pleasure-seeking stances of the audience coincide. And what crucially makes this happen is: nowhere more than in the cinema do the individual reactions that together make up the massive reaction of the audience actually depend on their immediately imminent massing. And in making themselves heard, they also check on one another. Again, painting offers a useful comparison here. A painting always had an excellent claim to being looked at by one person or a small number. The kind of simultaneous viewing of paintings by large crowds that occurs in the nineteenth century is an early symptom of the crisis affecting painting, which was certainly not triggered by photography alone but, relatively independently of photography, by the work of art’s claiming mass attention.
The fact is, painting is not able to form the object of simultaneous reception by large numbers of people, as architecture has always been, as the epic once was, and as film is today. And despite the inherent impossibility of drawing conclusions from that fact regarding the social role of painting, the same fact nevertheless counts as a severe setback at a time when painting, as a result of special circumstances and to some extent in defiance of its nature, finds itself face to face with the masses. In the churches and monasteries of the Middle Ages and in the palaces of princes up until the late eighteenth century, joint reception of paintings occurred not simultaneously but often in stages, when it was handed down hierarchically. Where this happened otherwise, what comes out is the special conflict that befell painting as a result of the image becoming reproducible by technological means. But although an attempt was made to bring painting before the masses in galleries and salons, there was no way in which the masses could have organized and checked on themselves in the context of that kind of reception.24 As a result, the same audience as reacts in a progressive way to a grotesque film will inevitably, in the presence of Surrealism, become a backward one.
The distinguishing features of film lie not only in the way in which man presents himself to the camera but in how, using the camera, he presents his surroundings to himself. A glance at performance psychology will illustrate the camera’s ability to test. A glance at psychoanalysis will illustrate a different aspect of that ability. Film has indeed enriched our perceptual world with methods that can be illustrated by those of Freudian theory. Fifty years ago, a conversational slip went more or less unnoticed. Its suddenly revealing depths in what had previously seemed a superficial discussion was probably regarded as an exception. Since The Psychopathology of Everyday Life [1901], that has changed. The book isolated and at the same time made susceptible of analysis things that had once swept past unnoticed in the broad stream of things perceived. Film has resulted in a similar deepening of apperception across the whole optical (and now also acoustic) segment of the sensory world. It is simply the reverse side of this state of affairs that performances presented in film can be analysed more exactly and from many more angles than can attainments portrayed in paint or on-stage. Compared with painting, it is the infinitely more detailed presentation of the situation that gives the performance portrayed on the screen its greater analysability. Compared with live theatre, the greater analysability of the performance portrayed cinematically is due to a higher degree of isolatability. That fact (and this is its chief significance) tends to foster the interpenetration of art and science. Indeed, in connection with a piece of behaviour embedded in a specific situation and now (like a muscle from a cadaver) neatly dissected out, it can scarcely be judged which is more gripping: its artistic worth or its scientific usefulness. It will count among the revolutionary functions of film that it renders the artistic and scientific uses of photography, which beforehand generally diverged, recognizably identical.25
By showing close-ups of them, highlighting hidden details of props with which we are familiar, exploring commonplace environments under the inspired guidance of the lens, on the one hand film increases our understanding of the inevitabilities that govern our lives while ensuring, on the other hand, that we have a vast, undreamt-of amount of room for manoeuvre! Our pubs and city streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our factories and railway stations seemed desperately imprisoning. Then film came along and exploded all these dungeons with the dynamite of its tenths of a second, leaving us free, now, to undertake adventurous journeys amid their widely scattered ruins. The close-up expands space as the slow-motion sequence dilates movement. And just as enlargement is not really concerned with simply clarifying what we glimpse ‘anyway’ but rather brings out wholly new structural formations in matter, neither does the slow-motion technique simply bring out familiar movement motifs but reveals in them others that are quite unfamiliar and that ‘bear no resemblance to decelerations of rapid movements but are like strangely gliding, floating, supernatural ones’.26 Palpably, then, this is a different nature that addresses the camera than the one that speaks to the eye. Different above all in that a space permeated by human consciousness is replaced by one that is unconsciously permeated. While it is quite normal for a person to form some account, even if only in outline, of the way others walk, that person will certainly know nothing of the walkers’ posture in the split second of their stepping out. And if we have a rough idea of how we pick up a cigarette lighter or a spoon, we know little of what actually happens between hand and metal when we do so, not to mention how this will vary according to our current mood. Here the camera intervenes with its different aids, its plunging and soaring, its interrupting and isolating, its stretching and condensing of the process, its close-ups and its distance shots. Only the camera can show us the optical unconscious, as it is only through psychoanalysis that we learn of the compulsive unconscious.
It has always been among art’s most important functions to generate a demand for whose full satisfaction the time has not yet come.27 The history of every art form has critical periods in which that form strives for effects that are able to find expression without effort only when technology has reached a new level – that is to say, in a new art form. The flamboyance, even crudeness, that art manifests in this way, especially in what are called ‘periods of decadence’, spring in fact from art’s richest core of historical forces. Latterly, Dadaism revelled in such barbarisms. Only now is what drove it becoming clear: Dadaism was trying to generate the effects that people now look for in film, but using the tools of painting (sometimes literature).
Any radically new, pioneering generation of demands will go too far. Dadaism does so to the point of sacrificing the market values that film possesses in such abundance in favour of more significant intentions – of which it was not, of course, aware in the form we have been describing. The commercial marketability of their works of art meant far less to the Dadaists than their non-marketability as objects of contemplative immersion. They sought to achieve that non-marketability, that unrealizable quality, not least by fundamentally disparaging their material. Their poems are ‘word-salad’, containing obscene expressions and all manner of linguistic detritus. Likewise their paintings, on to which they glued buttons or bus tickets. What they achieve by such means is the ruthless destruction of the aura of their output, which they use the means of production to stamp as ‘reproduction’. It is impossible, in the presence of a picture by Arp or a poem by August Stramm, to take time out, as one can with a Derain painting or a Rilke poem, for contemplation and for forming a view. Immersion, which in the degeneration of the bourgeoisie became a school of asocial behaviour, stood over against diversion as a variety of social behaviour.28 Dadaist demonstrations did indeed constitute a very violent diversion in that they placed the work of art at the centre of a scandal. That work above all had to meet one requirement: it must provoke public irritation.
In the hands of the Dadaists the work of art, from being a sight that seduced the eye or a sound that persuaded the ear, became a bullet. It flew towards the viewer, striking him down. It assumed a tactile quality. In so doing, it furthered the demand for film, the distracting element of which is also a mainly tactile element, being based on changes of setting and camera angle that stab the viewer with repeated thrusts. Compare, if you will, the screen on which the film unrolls to the canvas that carries the painting. The latter invites the viewer to contemplate; he is able, in front of it, to give himself up to his chain of associations. Watching a film, he cannot do this. Scarcely has he set eyes on it before it is already different. It cannot be pinned down. Duhamel, who hates film and understands none of its importance, though he does know something about its structure, comments on this state of affairs as follows: ‘I can no longer think what I wish to think. The moving images have ousted my thoughts.’29 The sequence of association of the person viewing those images is indeed instantly interrupted by their changing. That is what film’s shock effect is based on, which like every shock effect seeks to be absorbed by increased presence of mind.30 By virtue of its technical structure film has taken the wraps off the physical shock effect that Dadaism kept shrouded, as it were, in the moral sphere.31
The mass is a matrix from which currently all customary responses to works of art are springing newborn. Quantity has now become quality: the very much greater masses of participants have produced a changed kind of participation. The observer should not be put off by the fact that such participation initially takes a disreputable form. There has been no shortage, in fact, of participants who have stuck passionately to precisely this superficial aspect of the matter. Of these, Duhamel has spoken most radically. What he blames film for mainly is the nature of the participation it arouses among the masses. He calls film ‘a pastime for helots, a distraction for uneducated, wretched, overworked creatures who are consumed by their worries […], a spectacle that requires no concentration of any kind, that presupposes no ability to think […], lights no flame in people’s hearts, and kindles no other sort of hope than the ludicrous one of becoming, at some time, a “star” in Los Angeles’.32 Clearly, this is at bottom the old charge that the masses are looking for distraction whereas art calls for immersion on the viewer’s part. That is a platitude. Which leaves only the question: does this furnish an angle from which to study film? Here we need to take a closer look. Distraction and immersion constitute opposites, enabling us to say this: The person who stands in contemplation before a work of art immerses himself in it; he enters that work – as legend tells us happened to a Chinese painter when he caught sight of his finished painting. The distracted mass, on the other hand, absorbs the work of art into itself. Buildings, most obviously. Architecture has always provided the prototype of a work of art that is received in a state of distraction and by the collective. The laws governing its reception have most to tell us.
Buildings have been with mankind since its earliest history. Many forms of art have come and gone. Tragedy emerges with the Greeks, then disappears with them, to be revived centuries later only in accordance with its ‘laws’. The epic, after originating in the youth of nations, wanes in Europe with the passing of the Renaissance. Panel painting is a creation of the Middle Ages, and there is no guarantee that it will continue uninterrupted. However, man’s need for shelter is perennial. The art of building has never lain fallow. Its history is longer than that of any other art, and imaginatively recalling its effect is important as regards any attempt to form a conclusion about how the masses relate to art. Buildings are received twofold: through how they are used and how they are perceived. Or to put it a better way: in a tactile fashion and in an optical fashion. No idea of such reception is conveyed by imagining it as taking place collectedly – as is the case among tourists, for example, ogling famous buildings. The fact is, there is not, on the tactile side, any counterpart to what on the optical side constitutes contemplation. Tactile reception does not occur in both ways: through the medium of attentiveness as well as through that of habit. As regards architecture, the latter largely determines even optical reception. The truth of the matter is that this too occurs very much less in a state of close attention than in one of casual observation. However, there are circumstances in which this reception accorded to architecture possesses canonical value. Because: The tasks that at times of great historical upheaval the human perceptual apparatus is asked to perform are simply not solvable by visual means alone – that is to say, through contemplation. They are gradually mastered, on the instructions of tactile reception, by man’s getting used to them.
Getting used to things is something even the distracted person can do. More: the ability to master certain tasks in a state of distraction is what proves that solving them has become a person’s habit. Through the sort of distraction that art has to offer, a surreptitious check is kept on how far fresh tasks of apperception have become solvable. Since, moreover, there is a temptation for individuals to duck such tasks, art will attack the most difficult and crucial of them where it is able to mobilize masses. It is currently doing so in film. The kind of reception in a state of distraction that to an increasing extent is becoming apparent in all fields of art and is symptomatic of profound changes in apperception has its true practice instrument in film. In its shock effect film goes halfway towards meeting this form of reception. Film pushes back cultic value not only by persuading the audience to adopt an appraising stance but also by ensuring that this appraising stance in the cinema does not include attentiveness. The audience is an examiner, but a distracted one.
The increasing proletarianization of people today and the increasing formation of masses are two sides of one and the same sequence of events. Fascism seeks to organize the newly emergent proletarianized masses without touching the ownership structure that those masses are so urgently trying to abolish. Fascism sees its salvation in allowing the masses to find their voice (not, of course, to receive their due).33 The masses have a right to see the ownership structure changed: Fascism seeks to give them a voice in retaining that structure unaltered. Fascism leads logically to an aestheticization of political life. The violation of the masses, which in a leader cult Fascism forces to their knees, corresponds to the violation exercised by a film camera, which Fascism enlists in the service of producing cultic values.
All efforts to aestheticize politics culminate in one point. That one point is war. War, and war only, makes it possible to give mass movements on a colossal scale a goal, while retaining the traditional ownership structure. That is how the situation looks from the political viewpoint. From the viewpoint of technology it looks like this: Only war makes it possible to mobilize all the technological resources of the present day while retaining the ownership structure. Obviously, the apotheosis of war by Fascism does not deploy these arguments. Nevertheless, a quick consideration of them will be instructive. In Marinetti’s Manifesto Concerning the Ethiopian Colonial War we read: ‘For twenty-seven years we Futurists have been objecting to the way war is described as anti-aesthetic […]. Accordingly, we state: […] War is beautiful because thanks to gas masks, terror-inducing megaphones, flame-throwers, and small tanks man’s dominion over the subject machine is proven. War is beautiful because it ushers in the imagined metallization of the human body. War is beautiful because it enriches a meadow in flower by adding the fiery orchids of machine-guns. War is beautiful because it combines rifle-fire, barrages of bullets, lulls in the firing, and the scents and smells of putrescence into a symphony. War is beautiful because it creates fresh architectures such as those of large tanks, geometrical flying formations, spirals of smoke rising from burning villages, and much else besides […]. Writers and artists of Futurism […], remember these principles of an aesthetics of war in order that your struggles to find a new kind of poetry and a new kind of sculpture […] may be illuminated thereby!’34
As a manifesto, it has the advantage of clarity. The questions it poses merit adoption by the dialectician. He sees the aesthetics of modern warfare as follows: while natural exploitation of the forces of production is held in check by the ownership structure, an explosive growth in technological alternatives, tempi, and sources of power urgently seeks unnatural exploitation. This it finds in war, which with its destructive onslaughts proves that society was not mature enough to make technology its instrument, that technology was not developed enough to tame society’s elemental forces. Imperialistic war, in its ghastliest traits, is dictated by the discrepancy between hugely powerful means of production and their inadequate exploitation in the production process (in other words, by unemployment and lack of markets). Imperialistic war is a rebellion on the part of a technology that is collecting in terms of ‘human material’ the claims that society has absented from its natural material. Rather than develop rivers into canals, it diverts the human stream to flow into the bed of its trenches; rather than scatter seeds from its aeroplanes, it drops incendiary bombs on cities; and in gas warfare it has found a new way of eliminating aura.
‘Fiat ars – pereat mundus’, says Fascism, looking (as Marinetti professes) to war for artistic satisfaction of the different kind of sensory perception brought about by technology. This is clearly the culmination of l’art pour l’art. Humanity, which in Homer’s day provided a spectacle for the gods of Olympus, has now become one for itself. Its alienation from itself has reached a point where it now allows its own destruction to be savoured as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. That is how things are, given the kind of aestheticization of politics that Fascism pursues. Communism’s rejoinder is to politicize art.
[1936]