On Moving Image and Walter Benjamin

Cinema and modernity seem to have always been in conjunction with one another – this has been made clear during the lecture, by the authors of the week’s readings, and more dramatically by the film Man with a Movie Camera. Towards the conclusion, I came to a crucial realization: as modernity facilitated the development and proliferation of cinema and its technology, cinema also helped people to make sense of the proliferation of modernity around them. This led to even more puzzling questions: was modernity happening too fast that our forefathers found it too hard to keep up? Was cinema (as in other forms of entertainment) a means to escape the reality of modernity or was it used to interrogate the modern?  This critical thread for me is important as we delve into the various aspects of film theory and media studies for it serves as a starting point from which we could perceive and examine cinema. 

 

I am particularly drawn to Walter Benjamin’s approach on film, modernity, and society in general. Benjamin views films as essential in advancing political ideologies – in connecting the people and their social realities. He argues that the “function of film is to train human beings in the apperceptions and reactions needed to deal with a vast apparatus whose role in their lives is expanding almost daily.”

Films, like other mass produced art, impinge on the capacity of the audience to project their own feelings and judgment. Benjamin maintains that the increasing mechanization of cultural production has permitted a greater number of people to participate in a broader process of meaning-making – this extends from those who produce the film to those who view it. Films display “dialectical images” that reproduce narratives that engage the audience to evaluate and criticize the narratives of the films. This is linked to what Prof. Kim mentioned about the democratization of art – the expansion of the accessibility of art, previously enjoyed only through ritual and by a privileged few, towards the masses. But of course, at this juncture, I tended to question the very production of cinema and whether it can be absolutely called “democratized”. Who produced the narratives? Who decided the genre? To identify who controls cinema is also to question the validity of the democratization of art. As always, even cultural productions are not immune to power structures and interplay.

I was also captivated by the flashing and transformation of shots in the movie we saw. There was no narrative, no storyline that I should follow, but the flow of shots and pictures went one after the other keeping me alert and stimulating me to see – and be aware of what to see. As Benjamin mentions, films are essential as they mirror reality. Like the movie we saw, reality was projected – both the good and the bad, the ugly and the beautiful, birth, death, and all that was in between. I would like to end, by harking back to Benjamin’s statement: “the presentation of reality in film is incomparably the more significant for people of today, since it provides an equipment free aspect of reality they are entitled to demand from a work of art, and does so precisely on the basis of the most intensive interpenetration of reality with equipment.” This is perhaps why we view films: as it is just another way of simply looking.