3. [In 1934, when Benjamin wrote this essay, it was not generally known that America was the first (not the last) of Kafka’s three novels.]

  4. [Translated in 1971 by William Hallo as The Star of Redemption; a new English-language edition with the same title, translated by Barbara E. Galli, was published in 2004 by the University of Wisconsin Press.]

  5. [See note 3 above.]

  6. [References to (respectively) ‘A Country Doctor’, The Castle, and ‘The Knock at the Courtyard Gate’.]

  7. [This volume, containing not only the story of that name but also aphorisms, diary entries, and a number of other texts, came out in 1931, seven years after Kafka’s death.]

  8. [See note 3 above.]

  9. [In a translation that strenuously eschews ‘religious’ terminology. The fact is, verzeihen (the word Kafka used) covers the whole spectrum of meaning (as expressed in English) from ‘forgive’ to ‘grant a pardon’, as richten covers that from ‘condemn’ to ‘issue a directive’. All of which would seem to underline Benjamin’s point.]

  10. [Franz Kafka, letter to his friend/physician Dr Robert Klopstock, Matliary, June 1921.]

  11. [Kafka’s first published collection was called Betrachtung and is indeed usually referred to in English as Meditation (though it has recently been renamed Looking to See). The first piece in it is ‘Children in the Lane’.]

  12. [Kafka’s word is Erlösung, which with its associated verb erlösen unspecifically carries both literal and metaphorical connotations in an area of meaning where English specifies.]

  The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

  1. [This is the ‘accepted’ English version of the title. In German, Benjamin’s essay is entitled Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit, a more accurate (if rather more cumbersome) translation of which might be ‘The work of art in an age when it can be reproduced by technological means’.]

  2. Paul Valéry, Pièces sur l’art, Paris (undated), p. 105 (‘La Conquête de l’ ubiquité’).

  3. It goes with saying that the history of the work of art embraces more: that of the Mona Lisa, for instance, includes the nature and number of the copies made of it in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries.

  4. Precisely because genuineness is not reproducible, intensive intrusion by certain reproductive processes (technological ones) has provided a handle for differentiating and grading genuineness. Cultivating such distinctions was an important function of the art trade. This had an obvious interest in maintaining a separation between different prints from a wood block (those prior to and those subsequent to printing), a copperplate, and the like. With the invention of wood engraving, the quality of genuineness was attacked at the root, so to speak, before it had produced its late flowering. ‘Genuine’ was something a medieval Madonna image was not at the time of its making – not yet; that was something it became over the course of ensuing centuries, most plentifully, perhaps, in the last [the nineteenth century].

  5. The crummiest provincial performance of Faust nevertheless has this over a Faust film: notionally, it stands in competition with the first Weimar performance. And what, in terms of traditional content, the audience may recall across the footlights becomes unusable in the cinema (e.g. the fact that the character of Mephisto contains elements of a friend of Goethe’s youth, Johann Heinrich Merck, and so on and so forth).

  6. Abel Gance, ‘Le Temps de l’image est venu’ [‘The image’s time has come’], in L’Art cinématographique II, Paris, 1927, pp. 94–6.

  7. Having oneself brought closer to the masses in human terms may mean: having one’s function in society removed from view. There is no guarantee that a present-day portraitist, painting a famous surgeon at breakfast, surrounded by his family, will capture the sitter’s function in society more accurately than a seventeenth-century painter portraying his doctors as imposing presences – as Rembrandt, for example, does in The Anatomy Lesson.

  8. The definition of aura as ‘a unique manifestation of a remoteness, however close it may be’ represents nothing other than a formulation of the cultic value of the work of art in categories of spatial and temporal perception. Remoteness is the opposite of propinquity. The essence of remoteness is that it cannot be approached. Indeed, unapproachability is one of the chief qualities of the cultic image. By its very nature, it remains ‘remote however close’. Any propinquity lent by its embodiment as matter does not impair the remoteness retained from its constituting a manifestation.

  9. The more the cultic value of the image is secularized, the vaguer ideas about the substratum of its uniqueness will become. To an ever-increasing extent, the uniqueness of the phenomenon inhabiting the cultic image is driven out by the empirical uniqueness of the artist or the artist’s creative achievement in the eye of the beholder. Never in its entirety, of course: the concept of genuineness never ceases to reach beyond that of authentic attribution. (This comes out with especial clarity in the person of the collector, who always has something of the slave to fetishism about him and through possessing the work of art partakes of its cultic power.) Nevertheless, the function of the concept of authenticity in the contemplation of art remains unambiguous: with the secularization of art, authenticity supplants cultic value.

  10. In connection with works of cinematography, the fact that the product can be reproduced by technological means is not (as with works of literature, for instance, or painting) a condition of its mass circulation imposed from outside. The technological reproducibility of films is rooted directly in the manner of their production. This not merely facilitates the mass circulation of films in the most direct way; it positively necessitates it. It necessitates it because a film costs so much to produce that an individual who might be able to afford a painting, say, cannot afford to buy a film. In 1927 someone worked out that a major film, if it was to pay for itself, had to reach an audience of nine million. With sound films, of course, things took a step backwards at first; the audience for ‘talkies’ was limited by language barriers, and this occurred at the same time as Fascism was laying such stress on national interests. However, more important than recording this setback, which in any case dubbing diminished, is considering its connection with Fascism. The fact that the two phenomena emerged at the same time has to do with the economic crisis. The same disturbances as, viewed on a grand scale, led to the attempt to preserve the existing conditions of ownership by means of open violence led the film capital threatened by the crisis to force the pace of preparations for the sound film. The introduction of sound films then, for a time, brought an easing of the situation. There were two reasons for this: sound films brought the masses back to the cinema, and they also created a fresh solidarity between new capital from the electrical industry and film capital. Looked at from outside, therefore, the sound film promoted national interests; but looked at from inside it made film production even more international than before.

  11. This polarity is prevented from receiving due attention in the aesthetics of Idealism, which conceptually admits beauty only as something undivided (so excludes it as being divided). Nevertheless, in Hegel it makes its presence felt as clearly as can be imagined within the bounds of Idealism. ‘Images,’ we read in the Lectures on the Philosophy of History, ‘were around for a long time: piety had need of them early on for its devotions, but the images did not need to be beautiful ones; indeed, piety found these actually disturbing. In the beautiful image there is also something external present, yet in so far as this is beautiful its spirit speaks to mankind; however, a key element in those devotions is the relationship to a thing, since they are themselves merely an unspiritual numbing of the mind […]. Beautiful art […] arose in the Church itself […] even though […] art had already stepped outside the principe of the Church’ (Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Works, complete edition published by a League of Friends of the Immortal One, Vol. 9, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, ed. Eduard Gans, Berlin, 1837, p. 414). A passage in the Lectures on Aesthetics also indicates that Hegel was aware of a problem here. As we read in these Lectures: ‘[…] We are beyond being able to venerate works of art as divine, offering them our worship; the impression they make is of a more considered kind, and what they arouse in us requires a higher criterion’ (Hegel, op. cit., Vol. 10: Lectures on Aesthetics, ed. H. G. Hotho, Vol. 1, Berlin, 1835, p. 14).

  12. The transition from the first type of artistic reception to the second determines the historical course of artistic reception generally. Regardless of that, a certain oscillation between the two poles of reception can in principle be demonstrated for each individual work of art. Take the Sistine Madonna, for instance. Since Hubert Grimme’s study we have known that the Sistine Madonna was originally painted for display purposes. Grimme was prompted to undertake his research by the question: what is the point of the wooden shelf in the foreground of the painting on which the two putti are leaning? How (Grimme went on to ask) did an artist like Raphael come to furnish heaven with a pair of portières? Investigation revealed that the Sistine Madonna had been commissioned on the occasion of the public lying-in-state of Pope Sixtus. Popes lay in state in a particular side chapel of St Peter’s. At the rear of this chapel, which was shaped like a niche, Raphael’s painting rested on the coffin during the lying-in-state ceremony. What Raphael shows in the painting is the Madonna as if emerging from the niche framed by the two green portière curtains and surrounded by clouds approaching the pope’s coffin. At the memorial service for Sixtus an outstanding display value of Raphael’s painting came into its own. Some time later the painting was mounted on the high altar of the abbey church of the Black Monks in Piacenza. The reason for this exile lies in Roman ritual. Roman ritual forbids images that have been used for lying-in-state ceremonies from being used for worship at the high altar. Raphael’s work was to some extent devalued by this provision. To get a proper price for it all the same, the Curia decided to include in the sale its tacit permission to use the painting on the high altar. And to avoid a row, it was arranged that the painting should go to a monastic brotherhood in a remote provincial town.

  13. Similar considerations, but at a different level, are raised by Brecht: ‘If the term “work of art” is no longer suitable for the thing that emerges when a work of art becomes a commodity, we must carefully and discreetly (yet without trepidation) drop the term if we do not wish simultaneously to abolish the function of the thing itself, because this is a phase it must go through, and I mean that quite literally, this is no casual deviation from the correct path, what happens to it here is going to change it profoundly, eradicating its past to an extent that, were the old term to be resumed (and it will be, why not?), it will have ceased to evoke any reminder of what it once described’ ([Bertolt] Brecht, Versuche 8–10, [Vol.] 3, Berlin, 1931, pp. 301–2; ‘Der Dreigroschenprozess’).

  14. Abel Gance, op. cit., pp. 100–101.

  15. Quoted by Abel Gance, op. cit., p. 100.

  16. Alexandre Arnoux, Cinéma, Paris, 1929, p. 28.

  17. Franz Werfel, ‘Ein Sommernachtstraum. Ein Film von Shakespeare und Reinhardt’ [‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream. A Film by Shakespeare and Reinhardt’], in Neue Wiener Journal; quoted in Lu, 15 November 1935.

  18. ‘Film […] supplies (or might supply): practical conclusions regarding human actions in detail […]. Any kind of character-based motivation is lacking, the inner life of the characters never furnishes the main cause and is rarely the main result of the action’ (Brecht, op. cit., p. 268). The broadening of the field of what can be tested that the projector brings about in the screen actor matches the extraordinary broadening of the field of what can be tested that has come about for the individual as a result of economic circumstances. The importance of vocational-aptitude tests, for instance, is growing all the time. Vocational-aptitude testing is concerned with isolated bits of the individual’s performance. Both filming and vocational-aptitude testing proceed before a body of experts. The director in a film studio occupies precisely the same position as the test conductor in a vocational-aptitude test.

  19. Luigi Pirandello, Si Gira [1916; translated into English by C. K. Scott Moncrieff as Shoot (1927; reprinted 2006)]; quoted by Léon Pierre-Quint, ‘Signification du cinéma’ in L’Art cinématographique II, op. cit., pp. 14–15.

  20. Rudolf Arnheim, Film als Kunst [‘Film as Art’], Berlin, 1932, pp. 176–7. Certain ostensibly minor details by which the film director distances himself from what is done in the theatre assume added interest in this context. One is the experiment of having the actor play without make-up that, among others, Dreyer conducts in his Joan of Arc. He spent months finding the forty or so actors who form the court of inquisition. The search for these actors resembled one for props difficult to get hold of. Dreyer went to enormous lengths to avoid similarities of age, build, and physiognomy (see Maurice Schultz, ‘Le Masquillage’ [‘Make-up’], in L’Art cinématographique VI, Paris, 1929, pp. 65–6). If the actor becomes a prop, the prop on the other hand not infrequently functions as an actor. Certainly there is nothing unusual about film finding itself in the position of giving a prop a part. Rather than pick at random from an infinity of examples, let us cite just one that has particular probative value. A running clock will always simply be an irritant on-stage. Its role (measuring time) can never be assigned to it in the theatre. Even in a naturalistic play, astronomical time would conflict with stage time. So it is most significant that film, on occasion, has no trouble using a clock to measure time. This, more clearly than many other features, indicates how, under certain circumstances, every single prop is capable of assuming crucial functions. From here it is but a step to Pudowkin’s assertion that ‘acting associated with and based upon an object will […] always be among the most powerful methods of filmic creation’ (V. Pudowkin [quoted from German edition], Filmregie und Filmmanuskript (Practical manuals, Vol. 5), Berlin, 1928, p. 126). This makes film the first artistic medium capable of demonstrating how matter acts along with man. Film can therefore constitute an outstanding tool of materialistic representation.

  21. The altered mode of representation noted here as resulting from reproductive technology can also be seen in politics. Part of the crisis currently afflicting the bourgeois democracies is a crisis in the conditions influencing the representation of those who rule. The democracies place the ruler on display directly, in person, and they do it in front of MPs. Parliament is his audience! With innovations in recording equipment making the person speaking, while he is speaking, audible to and shortly afterwards visible to vast numbers, the stress is on how the politician conducts himself in front of that recording equipment. Parliaments are emptying at the same time as theatres. Radio and film are changing not only the function of the professional actor but equally the function of the person who, as rulers do, portrays himself before them. The direction of that change is the same (their different specialist tasks notwithstanding) for the screen actor as it is for the ruler. It seeks to display testable, indeed adoptable achievements in specific social conditions. This gives rise to a new kind of selection, a selection in front of the camera, from which the star and the dictator emerge as victors.

  22. The privileged character of the technologies concerned is disappearing. Aldous Huxley writes:

  Advances in technology have led […] to vulgarity […]. Process reproduction and the rotary press have made possible the indefinite multiplication of writing and pictures. Universal education and relatively high wages have created an enormous public who know how to read and can afford to buy reading and pictorial matter. A great industry has been called into existence in order to supply these commodities. Now, artistic talent is a very rare phenomenon, whence it follows […] that, at every epoch and in all countries, most art has been bad. But the proportion of trash in the artistic output is greater now than at any other period. That it must be so is a matter of simple arithmetic. The population of Western Europe has a little more than doubled during the last century. But the amount of reading – and seeing – matter has increased, I should imagine, at least twenty and possibly fifty or even a hundred times. If there were n men of talent in a population of x millions, there will presumably be 2n men of talent among 2x millions. The situation may be summed up thus. For every page of print and pictures published a century ago, twenty or perhaps even a hundred pages are published today. But for every man of talent then living, there are now only two men of talent. It may be of course that, thanks to universal education, many potential talents which in the past would have been stillborn are now enabled to realize themselves. Let us assume, then, that there are now three or even four men of talent to every one of earlier times. It still remains true to say that the consumption of reading – and seeing – matter has far outstripped the natural production of gifted writers and draughtsmen. It is the same with hearing matter. Prosperity, the gramophone and the radio have created an audience of hearers who consume an amount of hearing matter that has increased out of all proportion to the increase of population and the consequent natural increase of talented musicians. It follows from all this that in all the arts the output of trash is both absolutely and relatively greater than it was in the past; and that it must remain greater for just so long as the world continues to consume the present inordinate quantities of reading matter, seeing matter and hearing matter’ (Aldous Huxley, Beyond the Mexique Bay, [1934]).

  This is not of course a forward-looking view.

  23. The audacities of the cameraman do indeed invite comparison with those of the surgical operator. In a catalogue of specifically gestural tricks of technique, Luc Durtain includes those ‘that surgery calls for in connection with certain difficult operations. To exemplify this, let me take a case from ENT surgery […]; I am talking about the so-called endonasal perspective procedure; or permit me to refer to the acrobatic tricks that, guided by the reversed image in the laryngoscope, throat surgery is obliged to perform; I might also mention aural surgery, which is reminiscent of the kind of precision work carried out by the watchmaker. What elaborate sequences of the most delicate muscular acrobatics are not in fact required of anyone seeking to repair or rescue the human body? Just think of a cataract operation, where what almost amounts to a discussion goes on between the surgeon’s steel and tissue parts that are virtually fluid, or those always momentous interventions in the abdominal cavity (laparotomy)’ (Luc Durtain, ‘La Technique et l’homme’, in Vendredi, 13 March 1936, no. 19).