VI

  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.

  VII

  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

  VIII

  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.

  IX

  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.

  X

  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.

  XI

  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.