Benjamin Suvremeni Film

8/10/2019 Benjamin Suvremeni Film

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ngel Quintana

The Filmmaker as l a n eu r Walter enjamin and Contemporary Film

The first thing I want to do is to rethink the films being made today in terms ofWalter Benjamin. The first approach I came up with was to take a look at what

there is of the cinema in Walter Benjamins work. If we turn to The Work of Art in

the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, we find a text in which Benjamin continually

relates photography and film as two means of reproducing reality that are

changing the context of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It

would be a case, then, of seeing how this essay and the unfinished TheArcades

Projectthink film as one of the many emergent phenomena which transformed

reality in the nineteenth century. If, regrettably, Benjamin does not address this

issue directly inThe Arcades Project, he does so in The Work of Art in the Age of

Mechanical Reproduction, where film is seen as one of a series of phenomena

which changed not only the ways in which we perceive the world but also the

forms of sensibility as such, and the birth of the cinema coincides with a moment

at which culture begins to undergo a process of profound transformation. To

return to TheArcades Project, we could talk about the ways in which the

nineteenth-century arcades and panoramas the latter the equivalent of the

cinemas in present-day shopping complexes affected the process of

transformation of reality. However, I shall try to do so on the specific basis of

those writings in which Benjamin makes most reference to film.

I would like to look at how, on the basis of The Work of Art in the Age of

Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamins way is of value in thinking the

cinema today. The first issue is that in 1936, when Benjamin wrote The Work of

Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, film was not part and much less

the centre of a predominantly visual culture, as it is today. There was no

television, there was no Internet, there were no mobile phones with screens, etc.

Film today no longer has what could be considered its former centrality within

visual culture. I believe this is crucial. Nor did it have that centrality in the 60s and

70s, when its position was already marginal. To paraphrase Victor Erice: within afew years film will probably occupy the same place in the audio-visual sphere as

poetry does in literature. That is to say, a residual place. At the same time we

must recognize that the trades and crafts of the cinema have changed. And they

have all changed. People who had learned a trade an editor, even a director or

an actor found that it had changed, as incontrovertibly as the support had

changed. And here the move from analogue to digital has brought about a more

far-reaching change than we thought. A few years ago there was talk of the death

of the cinema: I prefer to talk not of death but of transformation. We have moved

on to something else, and that something else is a change of support. In other


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words, the director of photography is no longer exclusively concerned with

camera lighting but has a hand in production; the editor no longer works with

reels of film on a Moviola, because a computer does all of that, and, increasingly,

the projectionist handles not celluloid but a digital disk. I am saying all this toshow that there are a number of changes that make it necessary to rethink film,

and in this Walter Benjamin gives us some leads.

There has been a shift which needs to be considered. For some time now there

has been talk of audio-visual pollution, in reference to the fact that we are

constantly surrounded by images (from the platform in the subway to the TV in

the kitchen and the dining room and other rooms in our homes); what is new is

that, in addition, we can construct the images. These days everyone carries a

camera. Whereas not long ago only a few people had one, now we all do, whether

it be an actual camera or a mobile phone, on sale for a couple of hundred euros in

all kinds of outlets. Related to all this is another issue which I feel is important,

which is that we are increasingly putting these images onto our computers.

Images are now on the computer, and what is more and more important is that

the images are not only images: they are associated with the concept of the data

bank. In other words, the computer stores all of the images and we can use them

to do whatever we want.

Just recently there has been a lot of talk about something called Web 2.0, which is

a step on the way from the first websites, where the discourse was determined bythe medium, to an Internet in which the user is constantly intervening and

manipulating the computer. This has resulted in a change in the level of the

image, but it has also raised another issue that I personally find disturbing: it has

thrown into crisis the role of the professional vis--visthe amateur. This had

never happened before. Now, if you look at Martin Scorseses advertisement for

Freixenet cava, which cost 50 million euros, on YouTube, you find it right next to

images by complete amateurs, in the very same place. This adds a new difficulty

to finding the boundary between the amateur and the professional, to knowing

where each one begins and ends. And this is changing more and more our

relationship with images and, above all, throwing into crisis the way we think

them.

There is another issue when it comes to defining this space of mutation of film

an issue that is clearly paradoxical. If you look at the first books on digital culture

you see there was a kind of utopia, a kind of return to the utopia of Frankenstein,

who said that the time would come when images would have advanced so far that

we would have characters in four dimensions. In a sense, there is a kind of desire

here to realize with non-realistic supports the dream that the image will replace


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our everyday reality and thus enable us to create false realities. The cinema has

experienced a little of this, but curiously this utopia has been shattered. And it

has been shattered because the discourses in which this utopia was grounded

have been shown to be mistaken.

If this is by and large the reflection on the panorama of contemporary cinema,

then the big question is: what does Walter Benjamins work reveal to us about all

of this. To what extent can The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical

Reproduction and The Arcades Projectoffer a way forward for thinking about the

contemporary situation? In light of this, I was thinking about the first images I

wanted to show you. These are from a film made in 1953: Journey to Italy, by

Roberto Rossellini, and they make me think of how Walter Benjamin looked into

his past in order to understand his present. Actually, the excerpt I want to show

you is very well known: this is the scene at Pompeii, among the excavations,

where Ingrid Bergman is on the point of separating from her husband, George

Sanders. In Naples, the archaeologist in charge of the ruins of Pompeii invites

them to visit the site. There they see the bodies of a man and woman who were

killed by the eruption of Vesuvius and are still kissing nineteen hundred years

later. We ought to watch the whole film, but for now what I am interested in is a

Benjaminian reflection on these two bodies burned by the lava which consumed

them but created a kind of void. Ingrid Bergman, who is captivated, gets into the

space between the two bodies. But first lets look at the scene and then Ill try to

relate it to Walter Benjamin.

(Viewing of a sequence from the Rossellini film Journey to Italy)

This is a well-known sequence of images, but what has it got to do with Walter

Benjamin? I think that basically what Rossellini was doing with these images was

contrasting two models. One would be a marble statue, with which the artist has

tried to represent the world, and the other would be the statue that reflects some

facet of reality, something that has happened. Rossellini seeks to establish a

parallel between this mould and the relationship between and film. In other

words, in contrast to the arts of representation, with photography we have the

arts of reproduction. What do I mean by this? If in a photograph we have the

impression of something that happened in front of the camera, in a film we have

the impression of fragments of time that have taken place in front of us. Both

photography and film are arts which represent nothing in the world but owe their

being to the impression of something real that actually happened. In photography

and in analogue film that reality was registered on the negative. We can make

prints, but the impression was made on the negative.


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When Walter Benjamin wrote The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical

Reproduction he was not concerned with reproduction in the sense of the

photographic impression or with the difference between representation and

reproduction, but in the sense of making copies. And at the same time he wastalking above another very important factor, which is aura. What Benjamin was

saying is that photography and film have ushered in a crisis of the aura: in other

words, that the spectator has lost that once direct relationship with the work of

art. We are not dealing directly, here and now, with the artwork but with

reproduced images, and it is these that throw into crisis what we might call the

original value, the immediate appearance or presence that is the aura the fact

of being in front of something that is real. And art has this idea of aura. So what is

it that is thrown into crisis? Photography allows us to make so many copies of a

picture that we no longer know where the original is. And the cinema? Where is

the original Metropolis?Where is the original Citizen Kane?Where is the original

Journey toItaly?In other words, the copy ends up supplanting the idea of the

work itself. But even so, there is something and Rossellini reminds us of this

which is the idea that, although based on the idea of the copy, photography

and film are the repository of some idea of truth. To put it another way, something

that happened in front of the camera.

What is the situation today? Today, the idea of the original no longer makes sense.

Today we take a photo with a digital camera and the camera transforms it into

pixels. What are pixels? Little units of information that we can take andmanipulate. Its true that when we take a photograph, something has happened,

there is a truth. But this truth can be manipulated automatically. In what way do

we manipulate it? Today, 80% of the films made rely on a whole series of post-

production processes. Is the editing done as the footage is being shot? So where

does that leave us? We are facing a crisis far deeper than the one Walter Benjamin

talked about, the crisis of aura: in this new crisis the image has lost its condition

as a register of real events and entered into a process that could be called

hybridization. Why hybridization? Because in some degree the digital image is an

image we can manipulate: we can paint with pixels, we can intervene in pixels. We

are much closer to painting, much closer to the arts of representation. At the

same time it is also true that if I take a photograph, something has happened. So

it seems to me that what Walter Benjamin does in The Work of Art in the Age of

Mechanical Reproduction is open up a path that leads to a reflection on the

present and on what is happening today with this thing we call the digital image.

Lets leave Rossellini and turn to Orson Welles. What we are going to see below is

an excerpt from Orson Welless last film, F for Fake, which tells the story of an art

forger. This art forger lived in Ibiza and Orson Welles was fascinated by him,


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because this gentleman could paint a Modigliani as well as Modigliani and sell it

to a museum without anyone suspecting that it wasnt a Modigliani. And he could

do the same thing with a Matisse or with any other painter so much so that this

character would probably be the postmodern artist par excellence, the artist whocopies and fakes, who throws the idea of the original into absolute crisis and

turns the artwork into a series of forgeries of itself. Lets have a look at the

sequence.

(Viewing of a sequence from the Orson Welles film F for Fake)

This character ended up committing suicide in Ibiza because the pressure of

being wanted by the police was too much for him. Orson Welles believed that the

great artist is a forger. Remember Orson Welles started his own career with a big

lie. His War of the Worldsbegan with a hoax, a phoney emergency announcement

that aliens had invaded the United States, and a lot of people believed it. In fact,

Welles regarded himself a forger and called into question a certain idea of reality.

When he made F for Fake, in 1973, he was already thinking in terms of a crisis in

the contemporary world, a crisis of the concept of truth. So if we were talking

earlier about how to decide who is a professional and who is an amateur, back in

1973 Welles was already starting to engage with something along those lines.

There is a passage in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

where Walter Benjamin considers the dissemination of works of art in massculture. Of course, he knows that the reproduction of an artwork doesnt have the

aura of the original, but he also thinks it is very important how mass culture can,

by means of the copy, engage with works of art. Like Andr Malraux and his

imaginary museum, Benjamin is thinking here of how, by means of copies and

reproductions, people can visit (and get to know) a museum without having to

travel. We are now at a juncture if I may introduce another important topic at

this point where cultures ability to disseminate itself has taken an extreme

form. For instance, if we read a book, we look for it online. If we want to see a film,

we can go onto YouTube and stream it down via a system of piracy. Benjamin

envisaged the Bibliothque Nationale in Paris as a kind of great Kafkaesque

container in which all human knowledge was stored. And the fact is that a

significant portion of the books in this library are now on the Internet. So we can

enter a kind of non-space and establish a kind of relationship similar to the one

Benjamin described.

I think we have now put all of the issues on the table: piracy, copyright, access to

information and above all the fact that we are in a situation of real ambiguity

which is probably an indication that something is changing. And this thing that is


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changing could be said to be our direct relationship with the forms of knowledge.

In other words, at the present moment it is much easier to get hold of all the

means of knowledge (we have them within reach) but at the same time this leads

to a situation of irregularity in the legal sense that constantly places us in crisis. Ithink that something very like this was beginning to take shape in Walter

Benjamins thought. In view of this, and perhaps now more than ever before, I

believe we are in a situation that calls for reflection on the basis of Benjamin.

The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction opens with a quote from

Paul Valrys essay The Conquest of Ubiquity: The establishment of the fine arts

and their division into various categories go back to a time very different from the

present and to men whose power over things and circumstances was insignificant

in comparison with our own. But the amazing growth of our resources in the

adaptability and precision they have attained, the ideas and habits they are

creating, make it certain that profound changes are impending in the ancient

industry of the beautiful. Benjamin quotes Valry in relation to the way the

cinema is changing the form of reception and is winning over the masses. He

gives a very curious example, in the emergence of Dada in the nineteen twenties

at the same time as Charlie Chaplin. Dada has ended up in the museum, while

Chaplin is alive and filling cinemas. This relationship between Chaplin and

Dadaism has probably changed. Theres an observation of Godards which I like

very much, where he wonders why people talk describe a film by Chaplin as lovely

whereas no one would call a novel by Flaubert lovely. What does that mean?Probably that the cinema which Benjamin regarded as something that had just

burst on the scene belongs, in todays audio-visual world, somewhere in

prehistory. But it is true nonetheless that the cinema and photography have

changed our relationship to the arts. And it is also true, though a great deal has

already been said about this, that painting as a form of representation changed

radically under the influence of photography. But to come back to the present, I

would say that the relationship between the cinema and the arts is in a rather

curious situation. Once upon a time, avant-garde art and film lived in two very

different worlds: one was in the art galleries and the other was in the cinemas.

The cinemas today have become the realm of the spectacle and people who want

to see a film no longer go there. Film sought refuge in the art galleries and

filmmakers are the new artists, often creating works for galleries. Victor Erice, for

example, is a current example: one of his recent works was shown in the CCCB in

Barcelona. Jean-Luc Godard put on an exhibition in his latest work, though in his

case it didnt work. We could come up with a lot of names that are found in both

places. And it is true that cinemas have become places of spectacle, it is also true

that contemporary art has incorporated some of the characteristic forms of

representation of film.


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We are going to look at an excerpt from Godards Histoire(s)du cinma.Godard

made six episodes for television without the thing being either a TV series or a

movie. In fact, it has ended up being a kind of film-object. In any case, it was not

made to be seen in cinemas, and the cinemas were not interested in it. It has a

format of four chapters divided into a number of sections in which Godard

reflects on the relationship between the history of the cinema and the history of

the twentieth century. What have they given one another? We shall see, then,

what is left of the cinema in the twentieth century, and I would like to establish

here a fourth relationship with Walter Benjamin. Ultimately, in Histoire(s)du

cinma, Godard is the creative artist who comes closest to what Benjamin was

doing in creating The Arcades Project.Why? The Arcades Projectis based on the

fragment, and the fragment of the relationships between fragments can lead to aseries of multiple meanings. For Benjamin, every work in the field of history must

start with the search for origins. Benjamin considered that the culture of the

nineteenth century had created a series of phenomena that help us understand

the twentieth century as a whole. What he did was to put together a discourse on

the basis of fragmentation, composed of various materials in the form of a

collage. And Godard was doing something rather similar to Walter Benjamin in the

Bibliothque Nationale, being a bricoleur.What is a bricoleur?Someone who

sorts through bits and pieces, debris, rubbish and signs of something that was

part of an earlier civilization or can help us understand it.

(Viewing of a sequence from the Godard film Histoire(s)du cinma)

As we have seen, Godard creates images on the basis of associations, he recovers

old images and carries out various processes of assemblage in an approach very

similar to what Benjamin called the dialectical image.This is the equivalent, then,

of what Walter Benjamin did in The Arcades Project: a type of creation in which

the artist recycles earlier work and materials of all kinds. One of the fashionable

terms in cinema today is found footage, which means old film which is to create

something new. Archive footage, home movies, images that have no intrinsic

artistic quality but are capable, when combined, of revealing something of what is

happening today.

By way of conclusion I want to return to the question of how and where we situate

film in todays changing world, regarded in terms of the legacy Benjamin left us. Iwould say that the cinema forms part of or constitutes a kind of other in the realmof the audio-visual, and that in a society which has lost its referents, that hasgone from observing the world to accepting prefabricated images, film as a

medium is probably still capable of accomplishing a kind of centring of the world.

In the midst of the flow of information based on smallness and the space-time


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relationship, film allows us to reflect events. Probably the path film has to find is

one that will provide an image of the cinema itself and, when the image of theworld has been lost, will enable this image of the world to free itself from any kindof stereotype. In The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,

Benjamin makes a clear distinction between the photographer and the filmmaker.He compares the photographer to a shaman, who looks at the patient and tries tounderstand him from a distance, trying to cure him from a distance. In contrast,the filmmaker is like a surgeon, penetrating reality in the attempt to heal it and

understand it. And here we should keep Benjamins words very much in mind,understanding the filmmaker as a surgeon who penetrates the complex reality ofthe world today in order to understand it. Thank you very much.

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Benjamin Suvremeni Film