fungus44
Bluelighter
http://vimeo.com/105731173
The first episode of Ways of Seeing was, as Berger himself made clear, a popularization of Walter Benjamin's 1935 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (recently awkwardly rechristened as “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility" by a new translation), which these days has a status as one of the holiest texts of art theory. When Benjamin was writing, he was much closer in time to the invention of film itself than he to our present age of omnipresent one-click “reproducibility" (the Lumiere Brothers' Workers Leaving The Lumière Factory in Lyon came out in 1895; sound only came in in 1927). He was attempting to come to grips with a truly new way of seeing the world whose political effects were, as yet, still unclear.
The “decay of the aura" is the one-line summary people tend to take away from “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" in class. But its overall polemical meaning needs to be placed in its time: Against the background of Hitler, Benjamin saw the reflection of class struggle in the tension between high art and mass culture. New technologies, in particular film, created new ways of looking at the world, which he saw as potentially empowering to a politics of collective liberation, as opposed to the cultic and contemplative values of old-fashioned art (though he was well aware that new media's potentials were limited by what he called “film capital").
The Nazis were canny users of new mass media; the 1936 Olympics would be called the “Radio Olympics." But to legitimate themselves they also appealed to atavistic concepts of the Great Man, German tradition, and the cult of the soil (not to mention classical aesthetics; modern art was deemed “cultural Bolshevism"). By advancing his thesis about the inherently radical nature of modern technology, Benjamin hoped to “neutralize a number of traditional concepts—such as creativity and genius, eternal value and mystery—which, used in an uncontrolled way (and controlling them is difficult today), allow factual material to be manipulated in the interests of fascism." He was out, in other words, to show that the Nazis were on the wrong side of history, that the future belonged to the collective.
The first episode of Ways of Seeing was, as Berger himself made clear, a popularization of Walter Benjamin's 1935 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (recently awkwardly rechristened as “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility" by a new translation), which these days has a status as one of the holiest texts of art theory. When Benjamin was writing, he was much closer in time to the invention of film itself than he to our present age of omnipresent one-click “reproducibility" (the Lumiere Brothers' Workers Leaving The Lumière Factory in Lyon came out in 1895; sound only came in in 1927). He was attempting to come to grips with a truly new way of seeing the world whose political effects were, as yet, still unclear.
The “decay of the aura" is the one-line summary people tend to take away from “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" in class. But its overall polemical meaning needs to be placed in its time: Against the background of Hitler, Benjamin saw the reflection of class struggle in the tension between high art and mass culture. New technologies, in particular film, created new ways of looking at the world, which he saw as potentially empowering to a politics of collective liberation, as opposed to the cultic and contemplative values of old-fashioned art (though he was well aware that new media's potentials were limited by what he called “film capital").
The Nazis were canny users of new mass media; the 1936 Olympics would be called the “Radio Olympics." But to legitimate themselves they also appealed to atavistic concepts of the Great Man, German tradition, and the cult of the soil (not to mention classical aesthetics; modern art was deemed “cultural Bolshevism"). By advancing his thesis about the inherently radical nature of modern technology, Benjamin hoped to “neutralize a number of traditional concepts—such as creativity and genius, eternal value and mystery—which, used in an uncontrolled way (and controlling them is difficult today), allow factual material to be manipulated in the interests of fascism." He was out, in other words, to show that the Nazis were on the wrong side of history, that the future belonged to the collective.
