Page 191 - Darko Štrajn, From Walter Benjamin to the End of Cinema: Identities, Illusion and Signification. Ljubljana: Educational Research Institute, 2017. Digital Library, Dissertationes, 29.
P. 191
transcending cinema as the art of mass culture
Reality
The context of an array of the modernist more or less avant-garde artistic
movements in the decade preceding the dawn of fascism such us Neue Sa-
chlichkeit (New Objectivity) and Dada, as well as controversies among aes-
thetic concepts,2 must have helped Benjamin to expose the question of real-
ity concerning art in a given social order. “Benjamin’s version of these ideas
has the virtue above all of treating the category ‘art’ as itself having a his-
tory, and one continuing to be subject to drastic transformation” (Mattick,
2003: 96). However, Mattick, on the other hand, has a fundamental prob-
lem with Benjamin because he does not accept the idea of the disappear-
ing of aura and he in fact insists on the continuation of aura and the aurat-
ic effect in art in the industrial and post-industrial society. To put it briefly,
Mattick misses the point of the notion of aura in Benjamin’s thinking and
with it he also misses the connection of “category of art subject to drastic
transformation” and the vision of reality, so much interlaced with percep-
tion that it obviously becomes folded within the construction of reality, not
only as a concept, but as the sensual sphere. As Habermas observed, it is ex-
actly the destruction of aura that points to a “shift in the innermost struc-
ture of the works of art; the sphere once removed from and set up in oppo-
sition to the material process of life now disintegrates” (Habermas. 1979, p.
34). In other words, the destruction of aura, which ‘happens’ through the
very act of being recognised – its being is prompted by non-being – estab-
lishes a new correlation between art and reality in the space of mass cul-
ture. Without elaborating much further on this interesting and nonetheless
controversial matter, it could be assumed, that the ultimate decisive conse-
quence of the transformation of art within mass culture is created by first
photography and then, above all, the cinema in which formidable aesthetic
distinctive traits (for instance close-up, slow motion etc.) could have been
highlighted in Benjamin’s essay. Thus, cinema becomes the art of mass cul-
ture par excellence as it unites a complex aesthetic form with the machine
of reproduction. Let me repeat that Benjamin points out that “/…/ for con-
temporary man the representation of reality by the film is incomparably
more significant than that of the painter, since it offers, precisely because of
the thoroughgoing permeation of reality with mechanical equipment, an
aspect of reality which is free of all equipment. And that is what one is en-
2 Mattick refers to “Alexander Dorner‘s 1929 exhibition at the Hanover Provincial
Museum, in which he matched original works with photographic reproductions” as
a resource that inspired Benjamin in developing his concept of the aura (Mattick,
2003: 95).
189
Reality
The context of an array of the modernist more or less avant-garde artistic
movements in the decade preceding the dawn of fascism such us Neue Sa-
chlichkeit (New Objectivity) and Dada, as well as controversies among aes-
thetic concepts,2 must have helped Benjamin to expose the question of real-
ity concerning art in a given social order. “Benjamin’s version of these ideas
has the virtue above all of treating the category ‘art’ as itself having a his-
tory, and one continuing to be subject to drastic transformation” (Mattick,
2003: 96). However, Mattick, on the other hand, has a fundamental prob-
lem with Benjamin because he does not accept the idea of the disappear-
ing of aura and he in fact insists on the continuation of aura and the aurat-
ic effect in art in the industrial and post-industrial society. To put it briefly,
Mattick misses the point of the notion of aura in Benjamin’s thinking and
with it he also misses the connection of “category of art subject to drastic
transformation” and the vision of reality, so much interlaced with percep-
tion that it obviously becomes folded within the construction of reality, not
only as a concept, but as the sensual sphere. As Habermas observed, it is ex-
actly the destruction of aura that points to a “shift in the innermost struc-
ture of the works of art; the sphere once removed from and set up in oppo-
sition to the material process of life now disintegrates” (Habermas. 1979, p.
34). In other words, the destruction of aura, which ‘happens’ through the
very act of being recognised – its being is prompted by non-being – estab-
lishes a new correlation between art and reality in the space of mass cul-
ture. Without elaborating much further on this interesting and nonetheless
controversial matter, it could be assumed, that the ultimate decisive conse-
quence of the transformation of art within mass culture is created by first
photography and then, above all, the cinema in which formidable aesthetic
distinctive traits (for instance close-up, slow motion etc.) could have been
highlighted in Benjamin’s essay. Thus, cinema becomes the art of mass cul-
ture par excellence as it unites a complex aesthetic form with the machine
of reproduction. Let me repeat that Benjamin points out that “/…/ for con-
temporary man the representation of reality by the film is incomparably
more significant than that of the painter, since it offers, precisely because of
the thoroughgoing permeation of reality with mechanical equipment, an
aspect of reality which is free of all equipment. And that is what one is en-
2 Mattick refers to “Alexander Dorner‘s 1929 exhibition at the Hanover Provincial
Museum, in which he matched original works with photographic reproductions” as
a resource that inspired Benjamin in developing his concept of the aura (Mattick,
2003: 95).
189
