The work of art in the era of its technical reproducibility (Walter Benjamin). Benjamin V
"A work of art in the era of its technical reproducibility"(Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit) is an essay written in 1936 by Walter Benjamin.
In his work, Benjamin analyzes the transformation of works of art as physical objects in the context of the development of technologies for creating cultural phenomena. In his opinion, works of art began to lose their special aura. The cultural and ritual functions of a work of art have been replaced by political, practical and exhibition functions. Modern art entertains, while earlier art required concentration and immersion from the viewer.
Even the most perfect reproduction lacks the “here and now” of the original. An example is the theater. Previously, in order to see a performance, the viewer had to come to the theater and immerse himself in the surroundings. Reproduction allows you to transfer works of art beyond the scope of the situation accessible to the original. The same performance is now available not only in the theater, but also in the cinema. This, in turn, allows you to make movements to meet the public. Benjamin wrote: “The artistic skill of the stage actor is conveyed to the public by the actor himself; at the same time, the artistic skill of the film actor is conveyed to the public by the appropriate equipment.”
The actors' actions go through a number of tests. First, it is a movie camera that allows you to capture only successful takes. The movie camera itself allows you to choose better angles, showing the actor in a favorable light. Then, at the editing table, the material that is considered successful is edited into the finished film. Thus, unlike an actor on stage, a film actor has some significant concessions. But at the same time, the film actor does not have contact with the public and does not have the opportunity to adjust his performance depending on the public's reaction. The authenticity of a work of art is the totality of everything that a thing is capable of carrying in itself from the moment of creation, from its material age to its historical value.
In the perception of a work of art, various aspects are possible, among which two poles stand out:
1. Focus on works of art.
2. Emphasis on exhibition value
According to Benjamin, the greater the loss of value of any art, the less it is criticized by viewers and critics. Conversely, the newer the art, the more disgust it is criticized.
Benjamin believed that fascism tries to organize the proletarianized masses without affecting property relations, while seeking to provide the opportunity for self-expression, which leads to the aestheticization of political life. The aestheticization of politics reaches its peak in war. It is precisely this that makes it possible to direct mass movements towards a common goal and mobilize all technical resources while maintaining property relations. According to Walter Benjamin
In 1935 Walter Benjamin wrote a work that later became a classic: The work of art in the era of its technical reproducibility / Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit.
One of the main ideas of the work: in the pre-industrial era, works of art were unique. “But already in antiquity, technical reproduction took the first steps in artistic plasticity: casting and stamping made it possible to copy bronze statues, terracotta figurines and coins. The transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance brought the replication of printed prints of graphic works and, somewhat later, the distribution of texts through printing.
This short list Benjamin can be expanded a little. Millennia before printing, the practice of copying manuscripts arose. It was she who largely ensured the unity of the Greek-speaking cultural world. Library of Alexandria in its heyday there were about 700 thousand papyrus scrolls, and her catalog occupied 120
scrolls.
Tsar Ptolemy gave the order: to carry out a book search on all ships that enter the port of Alexandria; if any of the travelers has a book with them, select it, make a copy and give this copy to the owner, and leave the book for the library. The most reliable manuscripts of the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides were kept in Athens, in the archives of the Theater of Dionysus. Ptolemy asked for these manuscripts on a large deposit in order to compare the books of his library with them. The Athenians gave it, and, of course, the king sacrificed the deposit, returned the copies, and left the manuscripts in Alexandria.
The desire to have the author's originals was explained not so much by collecting autographs, but by pragmatism - they contained the most reliable texts, not spoiled by the mistakes of copyists.
In Ancient Rome, the rewriting of scrolls was put on stream on a real commercial scale. According to Pliny the Younger, the handwritten circulation of one book could be a thousand copies. Cicero, concerned about the abundance of distortions introduced by copyists, involved his rich friend Atticus in book publishing, who published magnificent collected works of Cicero and Plato, as well as the first illustrated book in antiquity - “Portraits” Terence Varro, containing about 700
biographies and images of prominent Romans and Greeks. […]
Modern technical reproduction, wrote Walter Benjamin in the already mentioned essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility” (1935), robs the work of its uniqueness and with it its special aura, rooted in the ritual nature of art.
(See two trends: Displacement of humans from the system and Replacement of intuition with technology - Approx.
I.L. Vikentieva):
As a result, the work becomes more accessible to the mass consumer, who feels like an expert, even without cultural training and special knowledge. His perception is relaxed and distracted, it is focused on entertainment. The creator also loses his independent status:
“The film actor standing in front of the camera knows that ultimately he is dealing with a public: a public of consumers who form the market.”
At the same time this process Benjamin did not rate it completely negatively. In the absent-mindedness of perception, he saw an opportunity through the means of art, primarily through the means of cinema, to mobilize the masses (in fact, to manipulate them). And if fascist art mobilizes the viewer, aestheticizing war and self-destruction, then communist art turns art into a means of political education:
“Entertaining, relaxing art quietly tests one’s ability to solve new perceptual problems. Since the individual person is generally tempted to avoid such tasks, art will snatch the most difficult and most important of them where it can Mobilize the masses. Today it does this in cinema. [...] With its shock effect, cinema responds to this form of perception.”
"Humanity, which once Homer was a subject of amusement for the gods watching him, and became such for himself. His self-alienation has reached the degree that allows him to experience his own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the highest rank. This is what the aestheticization of the policies pursued by fascism means. Communism responds to this by politicizing art."
Zelentsova E.V., Gladkikh N.V., Creative industries6 theory and practice, M., “Classics-XXI”, 2010, p. 25-26 and 31-32.
With the Nazis coming to power in Germany in 1933 Walter Benjamin moved to Paris.
Later, his attempt to illegally emigrate as part of a group from Nazi-occupied France through the Pyrenees to Spain failed... Fearing the Gestapo, Walter Benjamin poisoned himself with morphine.
His ideas influenced Theodor Adorno.
Walter Benjamin's misfortune has long been a commonplace in literature about him. Much of what he wrote saw the light only years after his death, and what was published was not always immediately understood. This is in his homeland, Germany. The path to the Russian reader turned out to be doubly difficult. And this despite the fact that Benjamin himself wanted such a meeting and even came to Moscow for this. In vain.
However, perhaps this is not so bad. Now that there are no longer any restrictions that prevented the publication of Benjamin’s works in Russian, and in the West he has ceased to be, as he was some time ago, a fashionable author, the time has finally come to just read him calmly. Because what was modern for him, before our eyes, is receding into history, but a history that has not yet completely lost touch with our time and therefore is not devoid of direct interest for us.
The beginning of Walter Benjamin's life was unremarkable. He was born in 1892 in Berlin, in the family of a successful financier, so his childhood was spent in a quite prosperous environment (years later he would write a book about him, “Berlin Childhood at the Turn of the Century”). His parents were Jews, but from those whom Orthodox Jews called Jews celebrating Christmas, so the Jewish tradition became a reality for him quite late, he did not so much grow up in it as come to it later, as one comes to phenomena of cultural history.
In 1912, Walter Benjamin began his student life, moving from university to university: from Freiburg to Berlin, from there to Munich and finally to Bern, where he completed his studies with the defense of his doctoral dissertation “The Concept of Art Criticism in German Romanticism.” The First World War seemed to have spared him - he was declared completely unfit for service - but it left a heavy mark on his soul from the losses of loved ones, from the break with people dear to him, who succumbed at the beginning of the war to militaristic euphoria, which was always alien to him. And the war still affected him with its consequences: post-war devastation and inflation in Germany devalued the family’s funds and forced Benjamin to leave expensive and prosperous Switzerland, where he was invited to continue his scientific work. He returned home. This sealed his fate.
In Germany, several unsuccessful attempts to find his place in life follow: the magazine he wanted to publish was never published, the second dissertation (necessary for a university career and obtaining a professorship), dedicated to the German tragedy of the Baroque era, did not receive a positive assessment at the Frankfurt university. True, the time spent in Frankfurt turned out to be far from useless: there Benjamin met the then very young philosophers Siegfried Kracauer and Theodor Adorno. These relations played an important role in the formation of the phenomenon that later became known as the Frankfurt School.
The failure of the second defense (the content of the dissertation simply remained unclear, which the reviewer conscientiously reported in his review) meant the end of attempts to find his place in the academic environment, which was not very attractive to Benjamin anyway. German universities were not going through their best times; Benjamin, already in his student years, was quite critical of university life, participating in the movement for the renewal of students. However, in order for his critical attitude to take shape into a certain position, some other impulse was still missing. It was a meeting with Asya Latsis.
The acquaintance with the “Latvian Bolshevik,” as Benjamin briefly described her in a letter to his old friend Gershom Scholem, occurred in 1924 in Capri. Within a few weeks, he calls her "one of the most remarkable women I have ever known." For Benjamin, not only a different political position became a reality - a whole world suddenly opened up for him, about which he had previously had the vaguest ideas. This world was not limited to the geographical coordinates of Eastern Europe, where this woman came into his life. It turned out that another world can be discovered even where he has already been. You just need to look at, say, Italy differently, not through the eyes of a tourist, but in such a way as to feel the intense daily life of the inhabitants of a large southern city (the result of this small geographical discovery was the essay “Naples” signed by Benjamin and Latsis). Even in Germany, Latsis, well acquainted with the art of the Russian avant-garde, primarily theatrical, lived as if in another dimension: she collaborated with Brecht, who was then just beginning his theatrical career. Brecht would later become one of the most significant personalities for Benjamin, not only as an author, but also as a person with an undoubted, even provocative ability for unconventional thinking.
In 1925, Benjamin went to Riga, where Latsis ran an underground theater; in the winter of 1926-27 he came to Moscow, where she had moved at that time. He also had a completely business reason for his visit to Russia: an order from the editors of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia for an article about Goethe. Benjamin, who quite recently wrote a study about Goethe’s “Elective Affinities” in a completely “immanent” spirit, is inspired by the task of giving a materialist interpretation of the poet’s personality and work. He clearly felt this as a challenge - to himself as an author and to the German literary tradition. The result was a rather strange essay (it is difficult to disagree with the editors, who decided that it was clearly not suitable as an encyclopedia article), only partially used for publication in the encyclopedia. It was not a matter of particular courage (or “audacity,” as Benjamin himself said) of the work; there were too many straightforward, simplified interpretive moves in it; there were also clearly unclear, not yet fully worked out passages. But there were also discoveries that foreshadowed the subsequent direction of Benjamin’s work. It was his ability to see in small, sometimes even the smallest details, something that unexpectedly opens up an understanding of the most serious problems. This was, for example, his casual remark that Goethe clearly avoided big cities all his life and had never been to Berlin. For Benjamin, a resident of a big city, this was an important watershed in life and thought; he himself tried to find out in the future the entire history of European culture of the 19th-20th centuries precisely through the life perception of these giant cities.
Biography
Walter Benjamin's misfortune has long been a commonplace in literature about him. Much of what he wrote saw the light only years after his death, and what was published was not always immediately understood. This is in his homeland, Germany. The path to the Russian reader turned out to be doubly difficult. And this despite the fact that Benjamin himself wanted such a meeting and even came to Moscow for this. In vain.
However, perhaps this is not so bad. Now that there are no longer any restrictions that prevented the publication of Benjamin’s works in Russian, and in the West he has ceased to be, as he was some time ago, a fashionable author, the time has finally come to just read him calmly. Because what was modern for him, before our eyes, is receding into history, but a history that has not yet completely lost touch with our time and therefore is not devoid of direct interest for us.
The beginning of Walter Benjamin's life was unremarkable. He was born in 1892 in Berlin, in the family of a successful financier, so his childhood was spent in a quite prosperous environment (years later he would write a book about him, “Berlin Childhood at the Turn of the Century”). His parents were Jews, but from those whom Orthodox Jews called Jews celebrating Christmas, so the Jewish tradition became a reality for him quite late, he did not so much grow up in it as come to it later, as one comes to phenomena of cultural history.
In 1912, Walter Benjamin began his student life, moving from university to university: from Freiburg to Berlin, from there to Munich and finally to Bern, where he completed his studies with the defense of his doctoral dissertation “The Concept of Art Criticism in German Romanticism.” The First World War seemed to have spared him - he was declared completely unfit for service - but it left a heavy mark on his soul from the losses of loved ones, from the break with people dear to him, who succumbed at the beginning of the war to militaristic euphoria, which was always alien to him. And the war still affected him with its consequences: post-war devastation and inflation in Germany devalued the family’s funds and forced Benjamin to leave expensive and prosperous Switzerland, where he was invited to continue his scientific work. He returned home. This sealed his fate.
In Germany, several unsuccessful attempts to find his place in life follow: the magazine he wanted to publish was never published, the second dissertation (necessary for a university career and obtaining a professorship), dedicated to the German tragedy of the Baroque era, did not receive a positive assessment at the Frankfurt university. True, the time spent in Frankfurt turned out to be far from useless: there Benjamin met the then very young philosophers Siegfried Kracauer and Theodor Adorno. These relations played an important role in the formation of the phenomenon that later became known as the Frankfurt School.
The failure of the second defense (the content of the dissertation simply remained unclear, which the reviewer conscientiously reported in his review) meant the end of attempts to find his place in the academic environment, which was not very attractive to Benjamin anyway. German universities were not going through their best times; Benjamin, already in his student years, was quite critical of university life, participating in the movement for the renewal of students. However, in order for his critical attitude to take shape into a certain position, some other impulse was still missing. It was a meeting with Asya Latsis.
The acquaintance with the “Latvian Bolshevik,” as Benjamin briefly described her in a letter to his old friend Gershom Scholem, occurred in 1924 in Capri. Within a few weeks, he calls her "one of the most remarkable women I have ever known." For Benjamin, not only a different political position became a reality - a whole world suddenly opened up for him, about which he had previously had the vaguest ideas. This world was not limited to the geographical coordinates of Eastern Europe, where this woman came into his life. It turned out that another world can be discovered even where he has already been. You just need to look at, say, Italy differently, not through the eyes of a tourist, but in such a way as to feel the intense daily life of the inhabitants of a large southern city (the result of this small geographical discovery was the essay “Naples” signed by Benjamin and Latsis). Even in Germany, Latsis, well acquainted with the art of the Russian avant-garde, primarily theatrical, lived as if in another dimension: she collaborated with Brecht, who was then just beginning his theatrical career. Brecht would later become one of the most significant personalities for Benjamin, not only as an author, but also as a person with an undoubted, even provocative ability for unconventional thinking.
About the German philosopher and writer Walter Benjamin, dedicated to his birthday. We also contacted Professor Sergei Romashko, who translated many of Benjamin’s works into Russian, and received permission from him to publish one of Walter Benjamin’s seminal texts.
Analyzing how the essence of a work of art changes along with the development of technique and technology, Benjamin argues that in the era of the possibility of mass replication, the uniqueness of a work of art, its aura, is lost. Gradually, with the development of mass forms of art (photography, cinema), the work loses its cult, ritual function, retaining only a utilitarian meaning. If earlier art required concentration of attention and depth of perception from the viewer, then new (mass) art does not require this: it entertains, diffuses attention and can serve as a powerful tool of mobilization and propaganda. Benjamin proves this thesis using the example of the use of works of art in fascism, speaking about the aestheticization of political life and war practiced under fascist regimes.
The essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility” has now not only not lost its relevance, but on the contrary: in the era of the total Internetization of humanity and the mass distribution of torrent trackers, Creative Commons licenses and 3D cinematography, Benjamin’s reflections are acquiring a new, global significance.
V. Benjamin. A work of art in the era of its technical reproducibility
Translation: Sergey Romashko
The formation of the arts and the practical fixation of their types took place in an era significantly different from ours, and was carried out by people whose power over things was insignificant in comparison with that which we have. However, the amazing growth of our technical capabilities, the flexibility and precision they have acquired, suggests that in the near future profound changes will occur in the ancient industry of beauty. In all arts there is a physical part which can no longer be looked at and which can no longer be used in the same way; it can no longer be outside the influence of modern theoretical and practical activity. Neither matter, nor space, nor time in the last twenty years have remained what they always were. One must be prepared for the fact that such significant innovations will transform the entire technique of art, thereby influencing the creative process itself and, perhaps, even miraculously change the very concept of art.
Paul Valery. Pieces sur l"art, p.l03-I04 ("La conquete de Pubiquite").
Preface
When Marx began to analyze the capitalist mode of production, this mode of production was in its infancy. Marx organized his work in such a way that it acquired prognostic significance. He turned to the basic conditions of capitalist production and presented them in such a way that from them one could see what capitalism would be capable of in the future. It turned out that it would not only give rise to increasingly harsh exploitation of the proletarians, but would also ultimately create conditions that would make its own liquidation possible.
The transformation of the superstructure occurs much more slowly than the transformation of the base, so it took more than half a century for changes in the structure of production to be reflected in all areas of culture. How this happened can only be judged now. This analysis must meet certain prognostic requirements. But these requirements are met not so much by theses about what proletarian art will be like after the proletariat comes to power, not to mention a classless society, but by provisions concerning trends in the development of art in the conditions of existing production relations. Their dialectic manifests itself in the superstructure no less clearly than in the economy. Therefore, it would be a mistake to underestimate the significance of these theses for the political struggle. They reject a number of outdated concepts - such as creativity and genius, eternal value and mystery - the uncontrolled use of which (and now it is difficult to control) leads to an interpretation of facts in a fascist spirit. The new concepts introduced further into the theory of art differ from the more familiar ones in that it is completely impossible to use them for fascist purposes. However, they are suitable for formulating revolutionary demands in cultural policy.
A work of art, in principle, has always been reproducible. What was created by people could always be repeated by others. Such copying was done by students to improve their skills, by masters to distribute their works more widely, and finally by third parties for the purpose of profit. Compared to this activity, the technical reproduction of a work of art is a new phenomenon, which, although not continuously, but in spurts separated by large time intervals, is acquiring increasing historical significance. The Greeks knew only two methods of technical reproduction of works of art: casting and stamping. Bronze statues, terracotta figurines and coins were the only works of art they could reproduce. All others were unique and could not be technically reproduced. With the advent of woodcuts, graphics became technically reproducible for the first time; Quite a long time passed before the advent of printing made the same thing possible for texts. The enormous changes that printing brought about in literature, that is, the technical ability to reproduce text, are known. However, they constitute only one particular, although especially important, case of the phenomenon that is being considered here on a world-historical scale. Wood engraving was supplemented during the Middle Ages by copperplate engraving and etching, and at the beginning of the nineteenth century by lithography.
Very briefly, Benjamin's type of intellectual sensitivity could be described as follows: he was sensitive to the human meanings of all things. That is why he resolutely did not accept contemporary capitalism as the negation of man. For the very thing that Marxists in their language call “alienation.” By the way, he didn’t like Soviet Russia at the end of the 1920s either. For this, he did not accept one of the main provisions of Marxism: the inevitable and all-subordinating progress - social movement along an ascending line. He could not imagine history without human participation. Free and crossing out any logic.
With the advent of lithography, reproduction technology rises to a fundamentally new level. A much simpler method of transferring a design onto stone, which distinguishes lithography from carving an image on wood or etching it on a metal plate, for the first time gave graphics the opportunity to enter the market not only in fairly large editions (as before), but also by varying the image daily. Thanks to lithography, graphics were able to become an illustrative companion to everyday events. She began to keep up with printing technology. In this regard, lithography was already surpassed by photography several decades later. Photography for the first time freed the hand in the process of artistic reproduction from the most important creative duties, which henceforth passed on to the eye directed at the lens. Since the eye grasps faster than the hand draws, the process of reproduction received such a powerful acceleration that it could already keep up with oral speech. During filming in the studio, the cameraman records events at the same speed with which the actor speaks. If lithography carried the potential of an illustrated newspaper, then the advent of photography meant the possibility of sound cinema. The solution to the problem of technical sound reproduction began at the end of the last century. These converging efforts made it possible to predict a situation that Valéry characterized with the phrase: “Just as water, gas and electricity, obeying an almost imperceptible movement of the hand, come from afar to our house to serve us, so visual and sound images will be delivered to us, appearing and disappearing at the behest of a slight movement, almost a sign"*. At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, the means of technical reproduction reached a level at which they not only began to transform the entire totality of existing works of art into their object and seriously change their impact on the public, but also took an independent place among the types of artistic activity. To study the level reached, nothing is more fruitful than an analysis of how two characteristic phenomena of it - artistic reproduction and cinematography - have a reverse effect on art in its traditional form.
* Paul Valery: Pieces sur 1" art. Paris, p. 105 ("La conquete de Rubiquite").
Even the most perfect reproduction lacks one point: here and now a work of art - its unique existence in the place in which it is located. The story in which the work was involved in its existence was based on this uniqueness and nothing else. This includes both the changes that its physical structure has undergone over time and the changes in property relations in which it has been involved.** Traces of physical changes can only be detected by chemical or physical analysis, which cannot be applied to reproduction; As for traces of the second kind, they are the subject of tradition, in the study of which the location of the original should be taken as the starting point.
The here and now of the original determines the concept of its authenticity. Chemical analysis of a bronze sculpture's patina can be useful in determining its authenticity; accordingly, evidence that a particular medieval manuscript comes from a fifteenth-century collection may be useful in determining its authenticity. Everything related to authenticity is inaccessible to technical - and, of course, not only technical - reproduction. * But if in relation to a manual reproduction - which in this case qualifies as a fake - authenticity retains its authority, then in relation to a technical reproduction this does not happen. The reason for this is twofold. Firstly, technical reproduction turns out to be more independent in relation to the original than manual reproduction. If we are talking, for example, about photography, then it is able to highlight such optical aspects of the original that are accessible only to a lens that arbitrarily changes its position in space, but not to the human eye, or can, using certain methods, such as enlargement or accelerated shooting, record images that are simply inaccessible to the ordinary eye. This is the first. And, besides - and this is secondly - it can transfer the likeness of the original into a situation that is inaccessible to the original itself. First of all, it allows the original to make a movement towards the public, whether in the form of a photograph, or in the form of a gramophone record. The cathedral leaves the square on which it is located to enter the office of an art connoisseur; A choral work performed in a hall or in the open air can be listened to in the room. The circumstances in which a technical reproduction of a work of art can be placed, even if they do not otherwise affect the qualities of the work, in any case they devalue it here and now. Although this applies not only to works of art, but also, for example, to a landscape that floats in front of the viewer’s eyes in a movie, in an object of art this process affects its most sensitive core; natural objects have nothing similar in vulnerability. This is his authenticity. The authenticity of a thing is the totality of everything that it is capable of carrying within itself from the moment of its origin, from its material age to its historical value. Since the first forms the basis of the second, then in reproduction, where material age becomes elusive, historical value is also shaken. And although only she is affected, the authority of the thing is also shaken.*
What disappears can be summed up by the concept of aura. In the era of technical reproducibility, a work of art loses its aura. This process is symptomatic, its significance goes beyond the realm of art. Reproductive technology, as one could express it in general terms, removes the reproduced object from the sphere of tradition. By replicating the reproduction, it replaces its unique manifestation with a mass one. And by allowing the reproduction to approach the person who perceives it, no matter where he is, it actualizes the reproduced object. Both of these processes cause a deep shock to traditional values - a shock to tradition itself, representing the opposite side of the crisis and renewal that humanity is currently experiencing. They are in close connection with the mass movements of our day. Their most powerful representative is cinema. Its social significance, even in its most positive manifestation, and precisely in it, is unthinkable without this destructive, catharsis-inducing component: the elimination of traditional value as part of the cultural heritage. This phenomenon is most obvious in large historical films. It is increasingly expanding its scope. And when Abel Gans* enthusiastically exclaimed in 1927: “Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Beethoven will make films... All legends, all mythologies, all religious figures and all religions... are waiting for the screen resurrection, and the heroes are impatiently crowding at the doors "* he - obviously without realizing it - invited mass liquidation.
* Precisely because authenticity cannot be reproduced, the intensive introduction of certain methods of reproduction - technical - has opened up the possibility of distinguishing between types and gradations of authenticity. Making such distinctions was one of the important functions of commerce in the field of art. She had a particular interest in distinguishing between different impressions from a block of wood, before and after an inscription, from a copper plate, and the like. With the invention of wood engraving, the quality of authenticity was, one might say, cut short before it reached its late flowering. The medieval image of the Madonna was not yet “authentic” at the time of its production; it became so in the course of subsequent centuries, and most of all, apparently, in the past. * The most wretched provincial production of Faust is superior to the film Faust at least in that it is in perfect competition with the Weimar premiere of the play. And those traditional moments of content that can be inspired by the light of the footlights - for example, the fact that the prototype of Mephistopheles was Goethe's youth friend Johann Heinrich Merck1 - are lost for the viewer sitting in front of the screen. * Abel Gance: Le temps de Pimage est venue, in: L "art cinematographique II. Paris, 1927, p. 94-96.** Of course, the history of a work of art includes other things: the history of the Mona Lisa, for example, includes the types and number of copies made of it in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Over significant periods of time, along with the general way of life of the human community, the sensory perception of man also changes. The method and image of organizing human sensory perception - the means by which it is ensured - are determined not only by natural, but also by historical factors. The era of the great migration of peoples, in which the late Roman art industry and the miniatures of the Viennese Book of Genesis arose, gave rise not only to an art different from that of antiquity, but also to a different perception. The scientists of the Viennese school, Riegl and Wickhof*, who moved the colossus of the classical tradition under which this art was buried, first came up with the idea of reconstructing the structure of perception of that time based on it. No matter how great the significance of their research was, their limitation lay in the fact that scientists considered it sufficient to identify the formal features characteristic of perception in the late Roman era. They did not try - and perhaps could not consider it possible - to show the social transformations that found expression in this change in perception. As for modern times, here the conditions for such a discovery are more favorable. And if the changes in the modes of perception that we witness can be understood as the disintegration of the aura, then it is possible to identify the social conditions of this process.
It would be useful to illustrate the concept of aura proposed above for historical objects with the help of the concept of aura of natural objects. This aura can be defined as a unique sensation of distance, no matter how close the object may be. To glide your gaze during a summer afternoon rest along the line of a mountain range on the horizon or a branch, under the shadow of which the rest takes place, means inhaling the aura of these mountains, this branch. With the help of this picture it is not difficult to see the social conditioning of the disintegration of the aura that is taking place in our time. It is based on two circumstances, both related to the ever-increasing importance of the masses in modern life. Namely: the passionate desire to “bring things closer” to oneself, both spatially and humanly, is just as characteristic of the modern masses,* as is the tendency to overcome the uniqueness of any given thing through the acceptance of its reproduction. Day after day, an irresistible need to master an object in close proximity through its image, or more precisely, its display, reproduction, manifests itself. At the same time, the reproduction in the form in which it can be found in an illustrated magazine or newsreel is quite obviously different from the painting. Uniqueness and permanence are fused in the picture as closely as fleetingness and repetition in reproduction. The liberation of an object from its shell, the destruction of the aura, is a characteristic feature of perception, whose “taste for the same type in the world” has intensified so much that with the help of reproduction it squeezes out this sameness even from unique phenomena. Thus, in the field of visual perception, what is reflected in the field of theory is the increasing importance of statistics. The orientation of reality towards the masses and the masses towards reality is a process whose influence on both thinking and perception is limitless.
* Approaching the masses in relation to a person can mean: removing one’s social function from sight. There is no guarantee that a modern portrait painter, depicting a famous surgeon at breakfast or with his family, reflects more accurately his social function than a sixteenth-century artist depicting his doctors in a typical professional situation, as, for example, Rembrandt in Anatomy.
The uniqueness of a work of art is identical to its embeddedness in the continuity of tradition. At the same time, this tradition itself is a very living and extremely mobile phenomenon. For example, the ancient statue of Venus existed for the Greeks, for whom it was an object of worship, in a different traditional context than for the medieval clerics, who saw it as a terrible idol. What was equally significant for both was her uniqueness, in other words: her aura. The original way of placing a work of art in a traditional context found expression in cult; The most ancient works of art arose, as we know, to serve a ritual, first magical, and then religious. What is decisive is the fact that this aura-evoking mode of existence of a work of art is never completely freed from the ritual function of the work.* In other words: the unique value of an “authentic” work of art is based on the ritual in which it found its original and first use. This basis can be mediated many times, however, even in the most profane forms of serving beauty, it is visible as a secularized ritual.* The profane cult of serving beauty, which arose during the Renaissance and lasted for three centuries, clearly revealed, having experienced the first serious shocks after this period, their ritual foundations. Namely, when, with the advent of the first truly revolutionary means of reproduction, photography (simultaneously with the emergence of socialism), art begins to feel the approach of a crisis, which a century later becomes completely obvious, it, as a response, puts forward the doctrine of l "art pour l" art, which is theology of art. From it then emerged a downright negative theology in the form of the idea of “pure” art, which rejected not only any social function, but also any dependence on any material basis. (In poetry, Mallarmé was the first to achieve this position.)
With the advent of various methods of technical reproduction of a work of art, its exhibition capabilities have grown to such a huge extent that the quantitative shift in the balance of its poles turns, as in the primitive era, into a qualitative change in its nature. Just as in the primitive era a work of art, due to the absolute predominance of its cult function, was primarily an instrument of magic, which was only later, so to speak, recognized as a work of art, so today a work of art becomes, due to the absolute predominance of its expositional function values, a new phenomenon with completely new functions, of which the aesthetic one perceived by our consciousness stands out as one that can subsequently be recognized as accompanying.* In any case, it is clear that at the present time photography, and then cinema, provide the most significant information for understanding the situation
* As the cult value of the painting undergoes secularization, ideas about the substrate of its uniqueness become less and less certain. The uniqueness of the phenomenon reigning in the cult image is increasingly replaced in the viewer’s mind by the empirical uniqueness of the artist or his artistic achievement. True, this substitution is never complete, the concept of authenticity never ceases to be broader than the concept of authentic attribution. (This is especially clearly manifested in the figure of the collector, who always retains something of the fetishist and through the possession of a work of art joins in its cult power.) Regardless Therefore, the function of the concept of authenticity in contemplation remains unambiguous: with the secularization of art, authenticity takes the place of cult value. *In works of cinematic art, the technical reproducibility of the product is not, as, for example, in works of literature or painting, an external condition for their mass distribution. The technical reproducibility of works of cinema is directly rooted in the technique of their production. It not only allows for the immediate mass distribution of films, but rather, it actually forces it. It is forced because the production of a film is so expensive that an individual who, say, can afford to buy a film, is no longer able to purchase a film. In 1927, it was estimated that a feature-length film would need to attract nine million viewers to break even. True, with the advent of sound cinema, the opposite trend initially appeared: the public found itself limited by linguistic boundaries, and this coincided with the emphasis on national interests that fascism carried out. However, it is important not so much to note this regression, which, however, was soon weakened by the possibility of dubbing, as to pay attention to its connection with fascism. The synchronicity of both phenomena is due to the economic crisis. The same upheavals that, on a large scale, led to an attempt to consolidate existing property relations through open violence, forced crisis-stricken film capital to speed up developments in the field of sound cinema. The advent of sound cinema brought temporary relief. And not only because sound films brought the masses back to the cinemas, but also because the result was a solidarity between the new capital in the electrical industry and film capital. Thus, while outwardly it stimulated national interests, it essentially made filmmaking even more international than before. * In the aesthetics of idealism, this polarity cannot be established, since its concept of beauty includes it as something inseparable (and, accordingly, excludes it as something separate). Nevertheless, in Hegel it manifested itself as clearly as possible within the framework of idealism. As his lectures on the philosophy of history say, “pictures have existed for a long time: piety used them quite early in worship, but he did not need beautiful paintings, moreover, such paintings even bothered him. In a beautiful image there is also an external, but since it beautiful, its spirit turns to man; however, in the rite of worship, the essential thing is the attitude towards the thing, for it itself is only the vegetation of the soul devoid of spirit... Fine art arose in the bosom of the church... although... art has already diverged from the principles of the church " (G. W. F. Hegel: Werke. Vollst&ndige Ausgabe durch einen Verein von Freunden des Verewigten. Bd. 9: Vorlesungen Ober die Philosophic der Geschichte. Berlin, 1837, p. 414.) In addition, one place in the lectures on aesthetics indicates that Hegel felt presence of this problem. “We have come out,” it says there, “of the period when it was possible to deify works of art and worship them as gods. The impression they now make on us is rather of a rational nature: the feelings and thoughts they evoke in us need still in the highest test." (Hegel, I.e., Bd. 10: Vorlesungen Qber die Asthetik. Bd. I. Berlin, 1835, p. 14). ** The transition from the first type of perception of art to the second type determines the historical course of the perception of art in general. Nevertheless, in principle, for the perception of each individual work of art, it can be shown that there is a peculiar oscillation between these two poles of types of perception. Take, for example, the Sistine Madonna. After research by Hubert Grimme, it is known that the painting was originally intended for exhibition. Grimme was prompted to investigate by a question: where did the wooden plank in the foreground of the picture on which the two angels lean came from? The next question was: how did it happen that an artist like Raphael had the idea to frame the sky with curtains? As a result of the research, it turned out that the order for the Sistine Madonna was given in connection with the installation of a coffin for a solemn farewell to the Pope with a pole. The pope's body was displayed for farewell in a certain side chapel of St. Peter's Basilica. Raphael's painting was installed on the coffin in a niche in this chapel. Raphael depicted how, from the depths of this niche framed by green curtains, the Madonna in the clouds approaches the pope’s coffin. During the funeral celebrations, the outstanding exhibition value of Raphael's painting was realized. Some time later, the painting ended up on the main altar of the monastery church of the black monks in Piacenza. The basis of this exile was Catholic ritual. It prohibits the use of images displayed at funeral ceremonies for religious purposes on the main altar. Because of this ban, Raphael's creation to some extent lost its value. In order to receive the appropriate price for the painting, the curia had no choice but to give its tacit consent to place the painting on the main altar. In order not to draw attention to this violation, the painting was sent to a fraternity in a distant provincial town. * Similar considerations are put forward, on another level, by Brecht: “If the concept of a work of art can no longer be preserved for the thing that arises when a work of art is transformed into a commodity, then it is necessary to carefully but fearlessly reject this concept, if we do not want to simultaneously eliminate the function of the this thing, since it must go through this phase, and without second thoughts, this is not just an optional temporary deviation from the right path, everything that happens to it will change it in a fundamental way, cut it off from its past, and so decisively that if the old concept will be restored - and it will be restored, why not? - it will not evoke any memory of what it once stood for." (Brecht: Versuche 8-10. N. 3. Berlin, 1931, p. 301-302; "Der Dreigroschenprozess".)*the definition of aura as “a unique sensation of distance, no matter how close the object in question may be” is nothing more than an expression of the cult significance of a work of art in the categories of spatio-temporal perception. Remoteness is the opposite of closeness. Distant in its essence is inaccessible. Indeed, inaccessibility is the main quality of the iconic image. By its nature it remains "distant, no matter how close it may be." The approach that can be achieved from its material part does not in any way affect the distance that it preserves in its appearance to the eye.
With the advent of photography, expositional meaning begins to crowd out cult meaning along the entire line. However, the iconic significance does not go down without a fight. It is fixed at the last boundary, which turns out to be the human face. It is no coincidence that the portrait occupies a central place in early photography. The cult function of the image finds its last refuge in the cult of memory of absent or deceased loved ones. In the facial expression captured on the fly in the early photographs, the aura reminds itself of itself for the last time. This is precisely their melancholic and incomparable charm. In the same place where a person leaves the photograph, the exhibition function for the first time overpowers the cult function. This process was recorded by Atget, which is the unique significance of this photographer, who captured the deserted streets of Paris at the turn of the century in his photographs. They rightfully said about him that he filmed them like a crime scene. After all, the crime scene is deserted. He is being removed for evidence. With Atget, photographs begin to turn into evidence presented at the trial of history. This is their hidden political significance. They already require perception in a certain sense. A freely moving contemplating gaze is inappropriate here. They throw the viewer off balance; he feels that a certain approach needs to be found to them. Signs - how to find him - are immediately shown to him by illustrated newspapers. True or false - it doesn't matter. For the first time, texts for photographs became mandatory. And it is clear that their character is completely different from the names of the paintings. The directives that those who view them receive from captions on photographs in an illustrated publication soon take on an even more precise and imperative character in cinema, where the perception of each frame is predetermined by the sequence of all the previous ones.
The debate that painting and photography waged throughout the nineteenth century about the aesthetic value of their works today gives the impression of being confused and distracting from the essence of the matter. This, however, does not deny its significance, rather emphasizes it. In reality, this dispute was an expression of a world-historical revolution, which, however, was not realized by either side. While the era of technical reproducibility deprived art of its cult basis, the illusion of its autonomy was forever dispelled. However, the change in the function of art, which was thereby set, fell out of sight of the century. And the twentieth century, which experienced the development of cinema, did not have it for a long time.
If they had previously wasted a lot of mental energy trying to solve the question of whether photography is art - without first asking themselves whether the invention of photography had changed the whole nature of art - then film theorists soon picked up the same hastily raised dilemma. However, the difficulties that photography created for traditional aesthetics were child's play compared to those that cinema had in store for it. Hence the blind violence characteristic of the emerging film theory. Thus, Abel Gance compares cinema with hieroglyphs: “And here we are again, as a result of an extremely strange return to what had already happened once, at the level of self-expression of the ancient Egyptians... The language of images has not yet reached its maturity, because our eyes have not yet are not accustomed to him. There is not yet sufficient respect, sufficient cultic reverence for what he expresses."* Or the words of Severin-Mars: "Which of the arts was destined for a dream... which could be so poetic and real at the same time! With this from the point of view of cinema, it is an incomparable means of expression, in the atmosphere of which only persons of the noblest way of thinking in the most mysterious moments of their highest perfection are worthy."** And Alexandre Arnoux*** directly ends his fantasy of silent cinema with the question: " Do not all the bold descriptions that we have used reduce to the definition of prayer? *** It is extremely instructive to observe how the desire to classify cinema as “art” forces these theorists to attribute cult elements to it with incomparable impudence. And this despite the fact that at the time when these arguments were published, films such as “The Woman of Paris” and “The Gold Rush” already existed.7. This does not prevent Abel Gance from using the comparison with hieroglyphs, and Severin-Mars speaks of cinema as one might speak of the paintings of Fra Angelico. It is characteristic that even today especially reactionary authors search for the meaning of cinema in the same direction, and if not directly in the sacred, then at least in the supernatural. Werfel states regarding Reinhardt's adaptation of A Midsummer Night's Dream that until now the sterile copying of the outside world with streets, rooms, train stations, restaurants, cars and beaches has been an undoubted obstacle to cinema's path to the realm of art. “Cinema has not yet grasped its true meaning, its possibilities... They lie in its unique ability to express the magical, miraculous, supernatural by natural means and with incomparable convincingness. "*
** cit. Abel Gance, I.e., p. 100. * AbelGance,l.c.,p. 100-101.
***Alexandra Arnoux: Cinema. Paris, 1929, p. 28.
The artistic skill of a stage actor is conveyed to the public by the actor himself; at the same time, the artistic skill of the film actor is conveyed to the public by the appropriate equipment. The consequence of this is twofold. The equipment presenting the performance of a film actor to the public is not obliged to record this performance in its entirety. Under the direction of the cameraman, she constantly evaluates the actor's performance. The sequence of evaluative glances created by the editor from the received material forms a finished edited film. It involves a certain number of movements that must be recognized as camera movements - not to mention special camera positions, such as a close-up. Thus, the actions of a film actor undergo a series of optical tests. This is the first consequence of the fact that the work of an actor in cinema is mediated by equipment. The second consequence is due to the fact that the film actor, since he does not himself make contact with the public, loses the ability of the theater actor to change the game depending on the reaction of the public. Because of this, the public finds itself in the position of an expert, who is in no way hindered by personal contact with the actor; the public gets used to the actor only by getting used to the movie camera. That is, she takes the position of a camera: she evaluates, tests.* This is not a position for which cult values are significant.
speare und Reinhardt. "Neues Wiener Journal", cit. Lu, 15 November 1935. *"The cinema... gives (or could give) practically applicable information about the details of human actions... All motivation, the basis of which is character, is absent, the inner life never provides the main reason and is rarely the main result of action" (Brecht, 1. p., p. 268). The expansion of the test field created by the equipment in relation to the actor corresponds to the extreme expansion of the test field that has occurred for the individual as a result of changes in the economy. Thus, the importance of qualifying exams and checks is constantly growing. In such exams, attention is concentrated on fragments of an individual's activity. The filming and qualifying exam takes place in front of a panel of experts. The director on the set occupies the same position as the chief examiner during the qualifying examination.* Franz Werfel: Ein Sommernachtstraum. Bin Film von Shakeii
What is important for cinema is not so much that the actor represents another to the public, but that he represents himself to the camera. One of the first to sense this change in the actor under the influence of technical testing was Pirandello. The remarks he makes on this subject in the novel Making a Movie lose very little by being limited to the negative side of the matter. And even less so when it comes to silent films. Since sound cinema did not make any fundamental changes to this situation. The decisive moment is what is played for the apparatus - or, in the case of talkies, for two. “The film actor,” writes Pirandello, “feels as if in exile. In exile, where he is deprived not only of the stage, but also of his own personality. With vague anxiety, he feels an inexplicable emptiness arising from the fact that his body is disappearing, that, moving , dissolves and loses reality, life, voice and sounds, to turn into a silent image that flickers on the screen for a moment, then disappears into silence... The small apparatus will play in front of the audience with its shadow, and it itself must be content with playing in front of , apparatus."* The same situation can be characterized as follows: for the first time - and this is the achievement of cinema - a person finds himself in a position where he must act with his entire living personality, but without its aura. After all, the aura is attached to him here and now there is no image of it. The aura surrounding the figure of Macbeth on stage is inseparable from the aura that, for the empathetic public, exists around the actor playing him. The peculiarity of filming in a film pavilion is that the camera takes the place of the audience. Therefore, the aura around the player disappears - and at the same time around the one he plays.
It is not surprising that it is a playwright, such as Pirandello, who, characterizing cinema, involuntarily touches on the basis of the crisis that is striking the theater before our eyes. For a work of art completely embraced by reproduction, and moreover, generated - like cinema - by it, there really cannot be a sharper contrast than the stage. Any detailed analysis confirms this. Competent observers have long noted that in cinema, “the greatest effect is achieved when they act as little as possible... The newest trend,” Arnheim sees in 1932, is to “treat the actor as a prop, which is selected according to need... and use it in the right place."* Another circumstance is closely connected with this inverse. An actor playing on stage immerses himself in the role. For a film actor, this very often turns out to be impossible. His activity is not a single whole, it is composed of individual actions. Along with random circumstances, such as renting a pavilion, busy partners, scenery, the very basic needs of film technology require that the acting be broken up into a number of edited episodes. We are talking primarily about lighting, the installation of which requires breaking down the event, which appears on the screen as a single quick process, into a number of separate shooting episodes, which can sometimes stretch into hours of studio work. Not to mention the very noticeable installation possibilities. Thus, a jump from a window can be filmed on a sound stage, with the actor actually jumping from the stage, and the subsequent escape is filmed on location weeks later. However, it is not at all difficult to imagine more paradoxical situations. For example, the actor should flinch after there is a knock on the door. Let's say he doesn't do it very well. In this case, the director can resort to the following trick: while the actor is in the pavilion, a shot is suddenly heard behind him. The frightened actor is filmed and the footage is edited into a film. Nothing shows more clearly that art has parted ways with the kingdom of “beautiful appearance,” 10 which was hitherto considered the only place where art could flourish.
* Rudolf Amheim: Film alsKunst. Berlin, 1932, p. 176-177. -Some details in which the film director moves away from stage practice and which may seem insignificant deserve increased interest in this regard. Such, for example, is the experience when an actor is forced to act without makeup, as Dreyer did in Joan of Arc. He spent months finding each of the forty performers for the Inquisition. The search for these performers was like search for rare props. Dreyer spent a lot of effort to avoid similarities in age, figure, facial features. (Cf.: Maurice Schuttz: Le masquillage, in: L "art cinematographique VI. Paris, 1929, pp. 65-66. ) If an actor turns into a prop, then the prop often functions, in turn, as an actor. In any case, it is not surprising that cinema is able to provide props with a role. Instead of choosing random examples from an endless series, we will limit ourselves to one particularly demonstrative example. A ticking clock on stage will always be annoying. Their role - the measurement of time - cannot be given to them in the theater. Astronomical time would conflict with stage time even in a naturalistic play. In this sense, it is especially characteristic of cinema that, under certain conditions, it may well use clocks to measure the passage of time. This shows more clearly than some other features how, under certain conditions, each piece of props can assume a decisive function in cinema. From here it remains only one step to Pudovkin’s statement that “the play... of an actor, connected with a thing, built on it, has always been and will be one of the most powerful techniques of cinematic design.” (W. Pudowkin: Filmregie und Filmmanuskript. Berlin, 1928, p. 126) Thus, cinema turns out to be the first artistic medium that can show how matter plays along with man. Therefore, it can be an outstanding tool for materialistic depiction.* Luigi Pirandello: On tourne, cit. Leon Pierre-Quint: Signification du cinema, in: L"art cinematographique II, I.e., p. 14-15.
The strange alienation of an actor in front of a movie camera, described by Pirandello, is akin to the strange feeling experienced by a person when looking at his reflection in a mirror. Only now this reflection can be separated from the person; it has become portable. And where is it being transferred? To the public.* The consciousness of this does not leave the actor for a moment. The film actor standing in front of the camera knows that ultimately he is dealing with a public: a public of consumers who form the market. This market, to which he brings not only his own; labor, but also his entire self, from head to toe and with all his entrails, turns out to be as unattainable for him at the time of his professional activity as for any product manufactured in a factory. Isn't this one of the reasons for the new fear that, according to Pirandello, fetters the actor in front of the movie camera? Cinema responds to the disappearance of the aura by creating an artificial “personality” outside the film studio. The cult of stars, supported by film-industrial capital, preserves this magic of personality, which has long been contained only in the spoiled magic of its commercial character. As long as capital sets the tone in cinema, one should not expect any revolutionary merit from modern cinema as a whole other than promoting a revolutionary critique of traditional ideas about art. We do not dispute that modern cinema, in special cases, can be a means of revolutionary criticism of social relations, and even prevailing property relations. But this is not the focus of this study, nor is it a major trend in Western European filmmaking.
What is associated with film technology - as well as with sports technology - is that each viewer feels like a semi-professional in assessing their achievements. To discover this circumstance, it is enough to listen once to how a group of boys delivering newspapers on bicycles discusses the results of bicycle races in their free minute. No wonder newspaper publishers hold races for such boys. Participants treat them with great interest. After all, the winner has a chance to become a professional racer. In the same way, the weekly newsreel gives everyone a chance to turn from a passerby into an extra actor. In a certain case, he can see himself in a work of cinematic art - one can recall Vertov’s “Three Songs about Lenin” or Ivens’ “Borinage.”11 Anyone living in our time can claim to participate in filming. This claim will become clearer if we look at the historical situation of modern literature. For many centuries the situation in literature was such that a small number of authors were opposed by a number of readers thousands of times greater than themselves. By the end of the last century, this ratio began to change. The progressive development of the press, which began to offer the reading public more and more new political, religious, scientific, professional, and local printed publications, led to the fact that more and more readers - at first from time to time - began to become authors. It started with the fact that daily newspapers opened a section “Letters from Readers” for them, and now the situation is such that there is, perhaps, not a single European involved in the labor process who, in principle, would not have the opportunity to publish information somewhere about his professional experience, complaint or report of an event. Thus, the division into authors and readers begins to lose its fundamental significance. It turns out to be functional; the boundary can lie one way or another depending on the situation. The reader is ready to turn into an author at any moment. As a professional, which he more or less had to become in an extremely specialized labor process - even if it is a professionalism concerning a very small technological function - he gains access to the authorial class. In the Soviet Union, labor itself gets a say. And its verbal embodiment is part of the skills required for work. The opportunity to become an author is sanctioned not by special education, but by polytechnic education, thereby becoming a public domain.*
All this can be transferred to cinema, where shifts that took centuries in literature have occurred within a decade. Because in the practice of cinema - especially Russian - these shifts have partially already taken place. Some of the people playing in Russian films are not actors in our sense, but people who represent themselves, and primarily in the labor process. In Western Europe, capitalist exploitation of cinema is blocking the way to recognition of the legal right of modern man to reproduce. Under these conditions, the film industry is entirely interested in teasing the masses who want to participate with illusory images and dubious speculations.
*The privileged nature of the corresponding technology is lost. Aldous Huxley writes: “Technical progress leads to vulgarity...technical reproduction and the rotary machine have made possible the unlimited reproduction of works and paintings. Universal schooling and relatively high wages have created a very large public who can read and are able to purchase reading material and reproduced images. To supply them with this, a significant industry has been created. However, artistic talent is an extremely rare phenomenon; therefore... everywhere and at all times, most artistic production has been of low value. Today, the percentage of waste in the total volume of artistic production is higher than ever before no matter what... We have a simple arithmetic proportion. Over the past century, the population of Europe has increased somewhat more than twice. At the same time, printed and artistic production has increased, as far as I can judge, at least 20 times, and possibly even more. by a factor of 50 or even 100. If x million population contains n artistic talents, then 2x million population will obviously contain 2n artistic talent. The situation can be characterized as follows. If 100 years ago one page of text or drawings was published, today twenty, if not a hundred pages are published. At the same time, instead of one talent, today there are two. I admit that, thanks to universal schooling, a large number of potential talents can act in our day, who in earlier times would not have been able to realize their abilities. So, let's assume... that today for every talented artist of the past there are three or even four. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that the printed output consumed is many times greater than the natural capabilities of capable writers and artists. The situation is the same in music. The economic boom, the gramophone and the radio have brought to life a vast public whose demands for musical production are in no way matched by population growth and the corresponding normal increase in talented musicians. Consequently, it turns out that in all arts, both in absolute and relative terms, the production of hack work is greater than it was before; and this situation will continue as long as people continue to consume a disproportionate amount of reading matter, pictures and music." (Aldous Huxley: Croisiere d'hiver. Voyage en Amerique Centrale. (1933) cit. Fernard Baldensperger: Le raflermissement des techniques dans la litterature occidentale de 1840, in: Revue de Literature Comparee, XV/I, Paris, 1935, p. 79 [approx. 1].)* The observed change in the method of exhibiting reproductive technology is also manifested in politics. Today's crisis of bourgeois democracy also includes a crisis of the conditions that determine the exposure of the bearers of power. Democracy exposes the bearer of power directly to the people's representatives. Parliament is its audience! With the development of transmitting and reproducing equipment, thanks to which an unlimited number of people can listen to a speaker during his speech and see this speech shortly after, the emphasis shifts to the contact of the politician with this equipment. Parliaments are emptying at the same time as theaters. Radio and cinema change not only the activities of a professional actor, but also those who, as bearers of power, represent themselves in programs and films. The direction of these changes, despite the difference in their specific tasks, is the same for the actor and for the politician. Their goal is to generate controlled actions, moreover, actions that could be imitated in certain social conditions. A new selection arises, a selection in front of the equipment, and the winners are the movie star and the dictator.
The characteristic features of cinema lie not only in how a person appears in front of a movie camera, but also in how he imagines the world around him with its help. A look at the psychology of acting creativity opened up the testing capabilities of film equipment. A look at psychoanalysis shows it from the other side. Cinema has indeed enriched our world of conscious perception with methods that can be illustrated by the methods of Freud's theory. Half a century ago, a slip of the tongue in a conversation most likely went unnoticed. The ability to use it to open up a deeper perspective in a conversation that had previously seemed one-dimensional was rather an exception. After the appearance of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, the situation changed. This work highlighted and made the subject of analysis things that had previously gone unnoticed in the general flow of impressions. Cinema has caused a similar deepening of apperception across the entire spectrum of optical perception, and now also acoustic. Nothing more than the reverse side of this circumstance is the fact that the image created by cinema lends itself to a more accurate and much more multidimensional analysis than the image in the picture and the performance on the stage. Compared to painting, this is an incomparably more accurate description of the situation, thanks to which the film image lends itself to more detailed analysis. Compared to a stage performance, the deepening of the analysis is due to the greater possibility of isolating individual elements. This circumstance contributes - and this is its main significance - to the mutual penetration of art and science. Indeed, it is difficult to say about an action that can be precisely - like a muscle on the body - isolated from a certain situation, whether it is more fascinating: artistic brilliance or the possibility of scientific interpretation. One of the most revolutionary functions of cinema will be that it will allow us to see the identity of the artistic and scientific uses of photography, which until then for the most part existed separately.* On the one hand, cinema with its close-ups, emphasizing the hidden details of familiar props, and exploring banal situations under the brilliant guidance of the lens, it increases the understanding of the inevitabilities that govern our existence, on the other hand, it comes to the point that provides us with a huge and unexpected free field of activity! Our pubs and city streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our train stations and factories, seemed to hopelessly enclose us in their space. But then the movie came and blew up this casemate with dynamite in tenths of a second, and now we calmly set off on a fascinating journey through the piles of its rubble. Under the influence of a close-up, space expands, while accelerated shooting expands time. And just as photographic enlargement not only makes clearer what can be seen “already”, but, on the contrary, reveals completely new structures of the organization of matter, in the same way, accelerated photography shows not only well-known motives of movement, but also reveals in these familiar ones movements that are completely unfamiliar, “giving the impression not of slowing down fast movements, but of movements that are figuratively sliding, soaring, unearthly.” As a result, it becomes obvious that the nature that appears to the camera is different from that which opens to the eye. The other is primarily because the place of space worked out by human consciousness is occupied by unconsciously mastered space. And if it is quite common that in our consciousness, even in the roughest terms, there is an idea of a human gait, then consciousness definitely knows nothing about the posture occupied by people in any fraction of a second of its step. We may be generally familiar with the movement with which we take a lighter or a spoon, but we hardly know anything about what actually happens between the hand and the metal, not to mention the fact that the action may vary depending on our condition. This is where the camera intrudes with its aids, its descents and ascents, its ability to interrupt and isolate, stretch and compress the action, zoom in and out. She opened up to us the realm of the visual-unconscious, just as psychoanalysis opened up the realm of the instinctive-unconscious.
* If you try to find something similar to this situation, then Renaissance painting appears as an instructive analogy. And in this case we are dealing with art, the unparalleled rise and significance of which is based to a large extent on the fact that it has absorbed a number of new sciences, or at least new scientific data. It resorted to the help of anatomy and geometry, mathematics, meteorology and color optics. “Nothing seems as alien to us,” writes Valerie, “as the strange claim of Leonardo, for whom painting was the highest goal and the highest manifestation of knowledge, so that, in his opinion, it required encyclopedic knowledge from the artist, and he himself did not stop at the theoretical analysis that amazes us living today with its depth and accuracy." (Paul Valery: Pieces sur I "art, 1. p., p. 191, "Autour de Corot".)
Since ancient times, one of the most important tasks of art has been the generation of needs, for the full satisfaction of which the time has not yet come.* In the history of every art form there are critical moments when it strives for effects that can be achieved without much difficulty only by changing the technical standard, i.e. .e. in a new art form. The extravagant and indigestible manifestations of art that arise in this way, especially during the so-called periods of decadence, actually originate from its richest historical energy center. The last collection of such barbarisms was Dadaism. Only now is its driving principle becoming clear: Dada tried to achieve, with the help of painting (or literature), the effects that the public today seeks in cinema. Every fundamentally new, pioneering action that creates a need goes too far. Dada does this to the extent that it sacrifices the market values that characterize cinema to such a high degree for the sake of more meaningful goals - which it is, of course, not aware of in the way described here. The Dadaists attached much less importance to the possibility of mercantile use of their works than to the exclusion of the possibility of using them as an object of reverent contemplation. Not least of all, they tried to achieve this exception by fundamentally depriving the material of art of sublimity. Their poems are word salad, containing obscene language and every kind of verbal garbage imaginable. Their paintings, in which they inserted buttons and travel tickets, were no better. What they achieved by these means was the merciless destruction of the aura of creation, burning the mark of reproduction on the works using creative methods. Arp's painting or August Stramm's poem does not, like Derain's painting or Rilke's poem, give us time to collect ourselves and come to an opinion. In contrast to contemplation, which with the degeneration of the bourgeoisie became a school of asocial behavior, entertainment arises as a type of social behavior.* Manifestations of Dadaism in art were indeed powerful entertainment, since they turned a work of art into the center of a scandal. It had to meet, first of all, one requirement: to cause public irritation. From an alluring optical illusion or a convincing sound image, the production of art turned into a projectile among the Dadaists. It amazes the viewer. It acquired tactile properties. Thus, it contributed to the emergence of a need for cinema, the entertainment element of which is primarily also of a tactile nature, namely, based on changes in the scene and shooting point, which jerkily fall upon the viewer. You can compare the canvas of the screen on which the film is shown with the canvas of a pictorial image. The painting invites the viewer to contemplate; in front of it, the viewer can indulge in successive associations. This is impossible in front of a film frame. As soon as he took in his gaze, he had already changed. It cannot be fixed. Duhamel, who hates cinema and understands nothing of its meaning, but something of its structure, characterizes this circumstance as follows: “I can no longer think about what I want.” Moving images took the place of my thoughts. Indeed, the chain of associations of the viewer of these images is immediately interrupted by their change. The shock effect of cinema is based on this, which, like any shock effect, requires the presence of mind to overcome an even higher degree.** Due to its technical structure, cinema released the physical shock effect, which Dadaism still seemed to package in a moral one, of this wrapper.* **
* The theological prototype of this contemplation is the consciousness of being alone with God. In the great times of the bourgeoisie, this consciousness fueled the freedom that shook off church guardianship. During the period of its decline, the same consciousness became a response to the hidden tendency to exclude from the social sphere those forces that an individual person sets in motion in communication with God. * Georges Duhamel: Scenes de la vie future. 2eed., Paris, 193 p. 52. ** Cinema is an art form that corresponds to the increased threat to life that people living today have to face. The need for a shock effect is a person’s adaptive reaction to the dangers that await him. Cinema responds to a profound change in apperception mechanisms - changes that, on the scale of private life, are felt by every passerby in the crowd of a big city, and on a historical scale - by every citizen of a modern state. *** As with Dada, cinema also provides important commentary on Cubism and Futurism. Both movements turn out to be imperfect attempts of art to respond to the transformation of reality under the influence of equipment. These schools tried, unlike cinema, to do this not through the use of equipment for the artistic representation of reality, but through a kind of fusion of the depicted reality with the equipment. At the same time, in Cubism the main role is played by anticipation of the design of optical equipment; in futurism - anticipation of the effects of this equipment, manifested during the rapid movement of the film* “A work of art,” says Andre Breton, has value only insofar as it contains a glimpse of the future.” Indeed, the formation of each art form is at the intersection of three lines of development. Firstly, technology works to create a certain form of art. Even before the advent of cinema, there were books of photographs, when you quickly leafed through them you could see a fight between boxers or tennis players; at fairs there were machines that turned a handle to start a moving image. - Secondly, already existing forms of art, at certain stages of their development, work hard to achieve effects that are later given to new forms of art without much difficulty. Before cinema was sufficiently developed, the Dadaists tried to produce an effect on the public with their actions, which Chaplin then achieved in a completely natural way. - Thirdly, often inconspicuous social processes cause changes in perception, which find application only in new forms of art. Before cinema began to gather its audience, the public gathered in the Kaiser's panorama to look at pictures that were no longer motionless. The spectators were in front of a screen in which stereoscopes were mounted, one for each. Pictures automatically appeared in front of the stereoscopes, which after a while were replaced by others. Similar means were also used by Edison, who presented a film (before the advent of the screen and projector) to a small number of spectators who looked into the apparatus in which the frames were spinning. - By the way, the device of the Kaiser-scope panorama especially clearly expresses one dialectical moment of development. Shortly before cinema makes the perception of pictures collective, in front of the stereoscopes of this quickly outdated institution, the gaze of a single spectator at a picture is once again experienced with the same acuteness as once when a priest looked at the image of a god in the sanctuary.
The masses are a matrix from which, at the present moment, every habitual attitude towards works of art comes out degenerated. Quantity has turned into quality: a very significant increase. the mass of participants led to a change in the way of participation. One should not be embarrassed by the fact that initially this participation appears in a somewhat discredited image. However, there were many who passionately followed precisely this external side of the subject. The most radical among them was Duhamel. What he primarily criticizes cinema for is the form of participation that it awakens among the masses. He calls cinema “a pastime for helots, an amusement for uneducated, wretched, overworked creatures, consumed by worries... a spectacle that requires no concentration, does not involve any mental faculties..., does not kindle any light in the hearts and does not awaken any others. hopes other than the ridiculous hope of one day becoming a "star" in Los Angeles."* As you can see, this is essentially the old complaint that the masses are looking for entertainment, while art requires concentration from the viewer. This is a common place. It is worth checking, however, whether it can be relied upon in the study of cinema. - A closer look is required here. Entertainment and concentration are opposites, which allows us to formulate the following proposition: he who concentrates on a work of art becomes immersed in it; he enters this work like the artist-hero of a Chinese legend contemplating his finished work. In turn, the entertaining masses, on the contrary, immerse the work of art into themselves. The most obvious thing in this regard is architecture. Since ancient times, it has represented the prototype of a work of art, the perception of which does not require concentration and occurs in collective forms. The laws of its perception are the most instructive.
Architecture has accompanied humanity since ancient times. Many forms of art have arisen and faded into oblivion. Tragedy arises among the Greeks and disappears with them, reviving centuries later only in its own “rules.” The epic, whose origins are in the youth of peoples, fades away in Europe with the end of the Renaissance. Easel painting was a product of the Middle Ages, and nothing guarantees its permanent existence. However, the human need for space is incessant. Architecture never stopped. Its history is longer than any other art, and awareness of its impact is significant in every attempt to understand the attitude of the masses towards a work of art. Architecture is perceived in two ways: through use and perception. Or, more precisely: tactile and optical. There is no concept for such perception if we think of it as a concentrated, collected perception, which is characteristic, for example, of tourists looking at famous buildings. The point is that in the tactile domain there is no equivalent to what contemplation is in the optical domain. Tactile perception passes not so much through attention as through habit. In relation to architecture, it largely determines even optical perception. After all, it is basically carried out much more casually, and not as intense peering. However, this perception developed by architecture in certain conditions acquires canonical significance. For the tasks that critical historical epochs pose to human perception cannot be solved at all on the path of pure optics, that is, contemplation. They can be dealt with gradually, relying on tactile perception, through habituation. Even the unassembled one can get used to it. Moreover: The ability to solve certain problems in a relaxed state just proves that solving them has become a habit. Entertaining, relaxing art quietly tests one's ability to solve new perceptual problems. Since the individual individual is generally tempted to avoid such tasks, art will snatch out the most difficult and important ones where it can mobilize the masses. Today it does this in cinema. Cinema is a direct tool for training diffuse perception, which is becoming more and more noticeable in all areas of art and is a symptom of a deep transformation of perception. With its shock effect, cinema responds to this form of perception. Cinema displaces cult meaning not only by placing the audience in an evaluative position, but by the fact that this evaluative position in cinema does not require attention. The public turns out to be an examiner, but an absent-minded one.
Afterword
The ever-increasing proletarianization of modern man and the ever-increasing organization of the masses represent two sides of the same process. Fascism tries to organize the emerging proletarianized masses without affecting the property relations that they seek to eliminate. He sees his chance in giving the masses the opportunity to express themselves (but in no case realizing their rights).* The masses have the right to change property relations; fascism seeks to give them the opportunity to express themselves while preserving these relationships. Fascism quite consistently comes to the aestheticization of political life. The violence against the masses, which he spreads on the ground in the cult of the Fuhrer, corresponds to the violence against the film equipment that he uses to create cult symbols.
Opposites attract: like Marinetti, Gurdjieff believed that the only way to develop is through struggle. “Fight, struggle - this is the basis of development,” he said. And he added: “When there is no struggle, nothing happens - a person remains a machine.” And here we come to the most interesting part. To the way aesthetics inspires politics, how the spiritual, metaphysical activity of artists is reflected in the material world, producing social upheavals. How internal dissonances are resolved in the external world.
All efforts to aestheticize politics culminate in one point. And this point is war. War, and only war, makes it possible to direct mass movements of the greatest scale towards a single goal while maintaining existing property relations. This is what the situation looks like from a political point of view. From the point of view of technology, it can be characterized as follows: only war makes it possible to mobilize all the technical means of modern times while maintaining property relations. It goes without saying that fascism does not use these arguments in its glorification of war. Still, it's worth taking a look at them. Marinetti’s manifesto on the colonial war in Ethiopia says: “For twenty-seven years we Futurists have been resisting the fact that war is recognized as anti-aesthetic... Accordingly, we state: ... war is beautiful because it grounds, thanks to gas masks, terror-inducing megaphones, flamethrowers and light tanks, the dominance of man over the enslaved machine. War is beautiful because it begins to turn into reality the metallization of the human body, which was previously the subject of a dream. War is beautiful because it makes the flowering meadow around the fire mitrailleuse orchids more lush. War is beautiful because it unites in one symphony of gunfire, cannonade, temporary calm, the aroma of perfume and the smell of carrion... War is beautiful because it creates new architecture, such as the architecture of heavy tanks, geometric figures of aviation squadrons, columns of smoke rising above burning villages, and much more... . Poets and artists of futurism, remember these principles of the aesthetics of war, so that they illuminate... your struggle for new poetry and new plastic arts! "*
The advantage of this manifesto is its clarity. The questions posed in it fully deserve dialectical consideration. Then the dialectic of modern war takes on the following form: if the natural use of productive forces is restrained by property relations, then the increase in technical capabilities, tempo, and energy capacity forces them to be used unnaturally. They find it in the war, which with its destruction proves that society is not yet mature enough to turn technology into its tool, that technology is not yet developed enough to cope with the elemental forces of society. Imperialist war in its most horrifying features is determined by the discrepancy between enormous productive forces and their incomplete use in the production process (in other words, unemployment and lack of markets). Imperialist war is a rebellion: of technology making demands on “human material” for which society does not provide natural material. Instead of building water canals, she sends a stream of people into the beds of trenches, instead of using airplanes for sowing, she showers cities with incendiary bombs, and in gas warfare she has found a new means of destroying the aura. “Fiat ars - pereat mundus”, l5 - proclaims fascism and expects artistic satisfaction of the senses of perception transformed by technology, this opens Marinetti, from war. This is an obvious taking of the I"art pour 1"art principle to its logical conclusion. Humanity, which in Homer was once an object of amusement for the gods watching him, became such for itself. His self-alienation has reached the degree that allows him to experience his own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the highest rank. This is what the aestheticization of the policies pursued by fascism means. Communism responds to this by politicizing art.
*eit. La Stampa, Torino.* At the same time, one technical point is important - especially in relation to weekly newsreels, the propaganda value of which is difficult to overestimate. Mass reproduction turns out to be particularly consonant with the reproduction of the masses. In large holiday parades, grand conventions, mass sporting events and military operations - in everything that the cinema camera is aimed at these days, the masses are given the opportunity to look at themselves in the face. This process, the significance of which does not require special attention, is closely connected with the development of recording and reproducing technology. In general, mass movements are perceived more clearly by equipment than by the eye. Hundreds of thousands of people are best reached from a bird's eye view. And although this point of view is accessible to the eye in the same way as to the lens, the picture obtained by the eye cannot, unlike a photograph, be enlarged. This means that mass action, as well as war, are a form of human activity that is especially responsive to the capabilities of the equipment.
