Quote:
"The surgeon constitutes one pole of an arrangement in which the other is occupied by the magician. The stance of the magician healing an invalid by laying-on of hands differs from that of the surgeon performing an operation on that invalid. The magician maintains the natural distance between himself and the patient…the surgeon does the opposite: he reduces the distance to the patent a great deal (by actually going inside him)…Magician and surgeon behave like painter and cameraman. The painter, while working, observes a natural distance from the subject; the cameraman, on the other hand, penetrates deep into the subject’s tissue.”
Interpretation:
What Benjamin is describing is how film is surgical in that it is a series of chopped up fragments – camera edits, changes in zoom, differing levels of detail, etc. all the while remaining invisible. It moves in and out, can alter the duration of time, and alter space and points of view. The painter’s painting is by contrast synthetic and always about that particular view held by the painter regardless of whether it is a landscape or abstract work of art.
The camera is such a potent force that the aura of the actor has no chance of surviving, the way it still does on a theatre stage. Hence, “[f]ilm’s response to the shrivelling of aura is an artificial inflation of ‘personality’ outside the studio.” This is Benjamin in 1936 describing the cult of celebrity we now accept as natural.
http://youtu.be/-CM9W6pYSEo
There are also interesting hints about the way film creates the possibility behind Warhol’s famous statement about everyone getting their ’15 minutes of fame’, that is, about the logic behind the appetite for reality TV shows (the lack of any shortage of people aspiring to claim their quarter-hour). There is also an interesting analysis of how film provides us with the idea that we are all experts of some sort when it comes to appraising what we’ve seen; the opposite of what most people feel in front of art, which is generally a sense of inadequacy.
