Hooooo boy this is late...

I actually really enjoyed Benjamin's article. As a student/teacher of acting/Drama, and therefore someone tremendously involved with theater and film as art, this was fascinating.

Although not explicitly stated, Benjamin's argument seems to be that film is not art in the traditional sense because the stuff of which that art is created, the performance of the actors, the setting filmed by the camera etc. is all being reproduced by the camera, and we experience it (the film) only as the camera allows us to do so. In essence, caught off from the aura of the performance the film, as a reproduction of the performance cannot be authentic and therefore cannot be a work of art as art is currently defined.

Of course, this is all implied because Benjamin says explicitly that whether or not film is art is not the point, not even the question, but a distraction from the more important issues at hand. Still, it is the question that has attracted my attention because much of the argument is based on the assumption that film is what he describes: an extraordinary reproduction of the performances of the actors through technology.

However, this is not true. While it reveals fascinating things about the relationship of art to authenticity, and while it lays firm ground for the effects of politicizing art (although I found the leaps at the end from film to Dada and Dada to Fascism/War to be a bit of a stretch, taken, as they are so quickly after such a slowly, laboriously developed argument about film and the relationship between art and mechanical reproductions), it fails to account for the film as a whole, as a created work. What he describes a mechanical reproduction of a series of performances by the actors is simply the raw footage. While there is a nod to the editing/cutting process it is insufficiently discussed. The role of the director in creating a film out of this raw material is to piece together from the reproductions of the performance of the actors a coherent whole (whether or not the plot is coherent is irrelevant, the film itself must cohere in some fashion). In the process actors of great skill do essentially imput their aura, their essence. Their is a reason that a given film is a Spielberg film, a Tim Burton film, etc. Because it is the director who is ultimately the artist behind the film. He/she to an extent, even creates the performance of the actors because he/she controls how we see them, what we see of them etc. It's why director's cuts etc. of films exist: the film is not created in the shooting of raw footage, that is where raw materials are gathered for the creation of the film in the editing room. I would argue that to those who know how to "read" film (and I am not terribly skilled at it, but have witnessed those who really are doing so) there is an aura/essence to a film as a whole in exactly the same way there is in other pieces of art. It's the aura/essence of the director. The actor feeds raw materials, and no two films by a director will have exactly the same aura/essence as another, but you can watch a given director's ouvre and there is a continuance in something intangible that is identifiable to the actor who produces it.

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Incidentally did the very idea of aura and essence feel platonic and "idealist" to anyone else?

And furthermore, what happens to the argument about film in an age where we have DVD, DVR etc. and can pause and attend to any portion of the film that we please? What effect does that have on Benjamin's argument?