Benjamin Reading

After reading Walter Benjamin’s, “The Work of Art,” I could absolutely see why Dr. Cummings enjoys him so much. His connection between art, mechanical reproduction and film was very intellectually stimulating. He opened my eyes with his vast amounts of examples of how the two worlds of art connect and disconnect. Benjamin’s description of authenticity was amusing. I especially enjoyed the way he described the differences between the unattainable aura the original beholds as compared to something that has tried to reproduce it. This notion reminded me of the painting, “The Mona Lisa.” There is a specific feeling you get when you actually go and stand in front of the original as opposed to simply seeing it duplicated in a book. “The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced” (pg 21). I thought that this quote summed the essence of authenticity up perfectly.

The other thing that stood out to me in this reading was Benjamin’s way of explaining the differences an actor entails on a stage as opposed to an actor performing for a camera. “The stage actor identifies himself with the character of his role. The film actor very often is denied this opportunity” (pg 26). Benjamin talks about how film “…responds to the shriveling of the aura with an artificial build up of the ‘personality’ outside of the studio” (pg 27). I got the feeling that Benjamin valued the art of theatre over the art cinema at this point. I felt that Benjamin tried to relay the message that film is merely a mechanical reproduction of theatre and therefore cannot necessarily hold the originality or aura that one might expect from theatre.