Art in the Age of

Mechanical Reproduction(Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility)

Effects of Reproduction• Reproduction

– Emancipation

• Mechanical Reproduction (Benjamin) – Psychological– Critical– Marxist

• Digital Reproduction (Steal this Film II) – Expression– Participation– Community– Bottom-up economy

Affordances of Mechanical Reproduction

• Independent of Original– Photographic prints show details invisible in

negative– Slow motion of film reveal structure, fleeting

expressions on the face (see lies, etc.)

• Exceed Reach of Original– Meet the beholder halfway, the cathedral

leaves the locale

Exhibition Valuevs. Cult Value

• Manual production– painting, architecture– locks into ritual– advances cultic behavior and thinking

• Mechanical reproduction– film, photography– emancipates from ritual– advances critical, cold, or distracted thinking

Welcoming the End of Art

• “Earlier much futile thought had been devoted to the question of whether photography is an art. The primary question – whether the very invention of photography had not transformed the entire nature of art – was not raised. Soon the film theoreticians asked the same ill-considered question with regard to the film. But the difficulties which photography caused traditional aesthetics were mere child’s play as compared to those raised by the film.”

Daguerreotype (1830s)

• First successful form of photography• Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre

– Scene painter for theater

• Nicéphore Niépce

Daguerreotype (1830s)

• First successful form of photography• Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre

– Scene painter for theater

• Nicéphore Niépce

Claiming Film (or any other a medium)

is an Art invokes Ritual• “What art has been granted a dream more

poetical and more real at the same time! Approached in this fashion the film might represent an incomparable means of expression. Only the most high-minded persons, in the most perfect and mysterious moments of their lives, should be allowed to enter its ambience.”

Claiming Film (or any other a medium)

is an Art invokes Ritual• “What art has been granted a dream more

poetical and more real at the same time! Approached in this fashion the film might represent an incomparable means of expression. Only the most high-minded persons, in the most perfect and mysterious moments of their lives, should be allowed to enter its ambience.”

Audience as Critic

• The film actor alienated from audience– Performing to reproductive machine

• The audience takes the position of a critic, without experiencing any personal contact with the actor.

• The audience’s identification with the actor is really an identification with the camera.

In Exile of Oneself

The film actor, feels as if in exile – exiled not only from the stage but also from himself. With a vague sense of discomfort he feels inexplicable emptiness: his body loses its corporeality, it evaporates, it is deprived of reality, life, voice, and the noises caused by his moving about, in order to be changed into a mute image, flickering an instant on the screen, then vanishing into silence .... The projector will play with his shadow before the public, and he himself must be content to play before the camera.”

—Pirandello

Aura

• Authenticity

• Authority of the object

• Cultic (socially constructed, mythical value)

Aura

• Authenticity

• Authority of the object

• Cultic (socially constructed, mythical value)

Aura

• “the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be”

• “If, while resting on a summer afternoon, you follow with your eyes a mountain range on the horizon or a branch which casts its shadow over you, you experience the aura of those mountains, of that branch.”

Aura

• “the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be”

• “If, while resting on a summer afternoon, you follow with your eyes a mountain range on the horizon or a branch which casts its shadow over you, you experience the aura of those mountains, of that branch.”

Dynamite of the tenth of a second

• By close-ups of the things around us, by focusing on hidden details of familiar objects, by exploring common place milieus under the ingenious guidance of the camera, the film, on the one hand, extends our comprehension of the necessities which rule our lives; on the other hand, it manages to assure us of an immense and unexpected field of action.

Muybridge

Dynamite of the tenth of a second

• Our taverns and our metropolitan streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories appeared to have us locked up hopelessly. Then came the film and burst this prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second, so that now, in the midst of its far-flung ruins and debris, we calmly and adventurously go traveling. With the close-up, space expands; with slow motion, movement is extended.

Dynamite of the tenth of a second

• The enlargement of a snapshot does not simply render more precise what in any case was visible, though unclear: it reveals entirely new structural formations of the subject. So, too, slow motion not only presents familiar qualities of movement but reveals in them entirely unknown ones “which, far from looking like retarded rapid movements, give the effect of singularly gliding, floating, supernatural motions.”

Kuleshov

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