23Pugnalate

Photography, film and politics in the work of Walter Benjamin (English)

PHOTOGRAPHY, FILM AND POLITICS IN THE WORK OF WALTER BENJAMIN.

In this essay, I will analyze Walter Benjamin’s discussions on photography and film in his short essays Little History of Photography (1931) and The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility (1936). I argue that, after close examination of both of these works, it seems that Benjamin is not completely pessimistic about the development of new technological instruments that have entered the realm of art and culture. Rather, Benjamin’s argument is that there are good and bad aspects to photography and film, as they both can be used as politicizing or aestheticizing instruments. Furthermore, Benjamin suggests that in the 20th century art acquires a political sense and is intended to have a direct impact on the everyday life of people, influencing their behavior. This political influence can be exercised in a progressive or reactionary direction. With his study of photography and film, Benjamin intends to propose a series of alternative aesthetic concepts to frame these new forms of visual culture, concepts designed to promote liberation and revolutionary emancipation, unusable by Fascist regimes.
My analysis will be centered on the relation between photography, film and politics and it will be divided into two main parts. In the first section of this paper, I will consider Benjamin’s discussion of photography, while in the second section, relatively shorter to avoid repetitiveness, I will consider Benjamin’s discussion of film and the film industry.
Benjamin extensively discusses the rapid development of photography in Little History of Photography, first published in Die literarische Welt, a German cultural newspaper. In this short essay, Benjamin offers a retrospective critique of modern technology examined in relation to social history. In this respect, Benjamin argues that there is not a perfect correspondence between technological and social development. Benjamin seeks to demonstrate that photography can serve the purposes of both progressive and reactionary politics and he believes that, until then, it was frequently being used to preserve the interests of the bourgeoisie. Photography could conceal the imminent decline of the bourgeoisie through the creation of a fake, artificial aura intended to bestow a sense of eternity and permanence upon the photographed subjects. That is why, in this essay, Benjamin criticizes the use of photography as an aestheticizing instrument (what he calls creative photography) and presents various examples of what he considers to be “good” photography.
Benjamin structures his essay as a photomontage, as he discusses individual images, takes them out of their original context and reinterprets them, relating them to one another. Benjamin proceeds in his examination chronologically, considering first the pictures produced with less sophisticated machineries. These pictures had a natural “aura”, here defined as “the unique appearance or semblance of distance, no matter how close it might be” (Little History of Photography, p. 518). With this, Benjamin points to the hic et nunc of early photographs, which presented the juxtaposition of two temporalities. For instance, if we take Dauthendey’s photo with his wife, we can simultaneously see a time that is past, that in which the couple lived, but also a time that had not yet come when the photograph was taken, a sort of future-in-the-past, represented by the tragic suicide of the woman.

In The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, “aura” denotes the authenticity of the work of art which, according to Benjamin, is lost through mechanical reproducibility. Therefore, to establish a sort of common denominator, we can think of “aura” as a natural feature, a mark of authenticity of most works of art and early photographs. In early photographs, the “aura” a technical effect resulting from the technology of the earliest cameras, characterized by a long exposure time and an absolute continuum from darkest shadow to brightest light. Then, after 1880s, photographic techniques developed further, the exposure time was reduced almost to a snapshot and photography became momentary, while the bourgeois notion of permanence was gradually fading away. Not willing to face and accept its decline, in order to maintain an air of permanence, the bourgeoisie resorted to the artificial creation of the aura. Benjamin talks about this in the last two pages of his essay (526-527), when he discusses creative photography. The latter is, for Benjamin, a kind of aesthetic photography that is detached from material reality and is thus deprived of any social, political and ethical connotation. Therefore, creative photography serves no other purpose than that of making the world appear beautiful, veiling the reality of the facts.
Creative photography is a deceitful tool. First used by the bourgeoisie to conceal their decadence, then used by Fascist regimes to create the “aesthetization of politics”, creative photography serves the wrong kind of politics. However, that does not entail that photography and film are inherently bad. Benjamin acknowledges the existence of alternative paths and demonstrates that, even after the industrialization and commodification of photography, some photographers used photography as an instrument of representation rather than mystification and aesthetization. It is the case of Atget’s and Sander’s photography. The reason why Benjamin likes Atget is because he has a documentary gaze that historicizes things, rather than aestheticizing them. Atget’s photography goes in the opposite direction in respect to creative photography, as it is intended to demystify the city of Paris, which is presented through its details and appears as already dead. With his pictures of empty streets and small details, Atget attempts to destroy the institutional narrative of Paris, idealized by the bourgeoisie as an eternal city. Atget wants to give a sense that photography is a form of leave-taking that allows you to say goodbye to things and places. Going against the idealization of Paris as an eternal city he presents it as a fleeting moment, far from the continuum of the mystifying discourse created around the city.


Eugène Atget, Church of St Gervais, Paris, about 1903.

Benjamin draws an important distinction between portrait photography and Sander’s photography. Sander takes the reproducibility of technology and applies it to his subjects. Contrary to portrait photography, Sander de-individualizes his subjects, turning them into a reproducible type, without distinction among social classes. For instance, Benjamin presents Sander’s picture of a pastry cook and of a political representative. Sander sacrifices individuality to stress the reproducibility of the social function of his subjects, and one of the ways he does this is through captions. We can see here, with Sander, the strong link between visual and verbal language, the fundamental interconnection between image and caption.

      
In The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, Benjamin considers the effects of photography, particularly the significant shift in perception it has provoked. The changes brought about by the advent of photography are the acceleration of pictorial reproduction, which permitted to reproduce all works of art, profoundly modifying their original effect on the observer and their overall reception. Emphasis is put on the decay of the “aura”, which Benjamin associates to the desire for the masses to get closer to things to which they did not have access before. The withering of the “aura”, lost through mechanical reproducibility, is the price to pay for to render art accessible to the masses. “Technological reproduction … enables the original to meet the recipient halfway” (The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, p. 21). During this journey, however, the original loses its authenticity, its “aura”, its hic et nunc that had been the main reason for cult value, linked to ritual and tradition. Cult value characterized the reception of works of art before the advent of photography, which replaced it with exhibition value. Such replacement did not cause the loss of cult value, but its commodification: the cult value of works of art has been massified, not lost, as everyone is now invited to share the criteria for aesthetic evaluation. Uniqueness is lost in an environment of creation of mass reproduction of objects. Exhibition value had so far been used by Fascist regimes for the purpose of “the aesthetization of politics”, intended to lead the masses to think that their condition had improved as they were able to participate in the bourgeois world of aesthetic appreciation. The purpose of his essay is to present a possible redirection of exhibition value: instead of aestheticizing the masses, it should politicize the masses through their representation. In other words, Benjamin advocates for a photography that exhibits the masses, rather than exhibiting art for the masses. It is interesting to note that in the French version of this essay Benjamin uses the verb exposer which, in French, it does not only mean “to exhibit”, but also “to denounce”, “to accuse”. Therefore, Benjamin’s word choice here recalls the conclusion of Little History of Photography, where he argues that Atget’s photographs look like the pictures of a crime scene: they do not aestheticize, they provide evidence. For Benjamin, photographs should assign blame.
Photography has the potential to show things that would otherwise remain unseen to the human eye. In this respect, Benjamin presents the notion of the “optical unconscious” (The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, pp. 37-38), the most important change in perception brought about by photography. Paraphrasing the parallel he makes, just as psychoanalysis has been able to discover the unconscious, so photography, through close-ups and slow motion reveals certain dimensions of reality we would not otherwise notice. The effect provoked by the images captured by the optical unconscious is one of surprise. These images show, in fact, aspects of everyday life that have always been there but had remained unnoticed, like the split-second in which someone takes a step. The “optical unconscious” is thus a positive result of photography and film as, to borrow Shklovsky’s terminology, it leads to the de-automatization of perception, necessary for the masses to be aware of the social and political conditions of their time.
Benjamin’s criticism to photography applies, for the most part, to cinema as well. At the end of Little history of Photography, Benjamin mentions Russian photography and film, arguing that they provide an example of a good use of these new media, being used as means to experiment and instruct. A more extensive discussion of film is found in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, where Benjamin criticizes the industry of cinema and the rapid, unstoppable development it had until then. Like photography, for Benjamin, film had the potential to be used for good purposes, that is to say, to serve a progressive kind of politics. However, it was mostly used as an instrument of Fascism to aestheticize the masses and, even more than photography, it was used as a medium of indoctrination. Being a rapid succession of images, films absorb the spectator into a broader narrative that gives him the illusion that, in order to understand one single footage, he must relate it to the previous images with which he has been bombarded. Film is thus a continuum and that is what renders it potentially more dangerous than photography. However, film is also a montage of images. The continuity of footages can be broken up into smaller pieces, smaller fragments that can be interpreted on their own. For this reason, films can be analyzed more meticulously than theatrical performances, as the performance presented in film can be more easily isolated. Therefore, Benjamin argues that one of the potential revolutionary uses of cinema is that it can be analyzed and, thus, reveal aspects of human society that remain unnoticed, as they are aestheticized by political powers. Essentially, films represent human beings through a machine. “The representation of human beings by means of an apparatus has made possible a highly productive use of the human being’s self-alienation” (The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, p. 32). That is to say, human beings are represented through a machine that alienates them from themselves, separating them from the image of them that is at the center of cinematic representation. Moreover, that of cinema is an exploitative system that also alienates the actor from the audience and from the director, the producers and the executives. The invisibility of those that record, edit and manipulate the machine reinforces their authority, power and control over what is being represented. The mastery of the machine coincides with the mastery of politics. Hence, in order to be used for the purposes of revolutionary politics, film has to liberate itself from the exploitative capitalist apparatus of film industry.
In conclusion, Benjamin argues that photography and film can both be used as instruments serving good purposes in so far as they are subject to examination and critical analysis. When used as instruments of aesthetization, these are dangerous as they create a false, mystified version of reality that conceals the material reality of politics and exploitation. On the contrary, if they are used to politicize, that is, to denounce reality through its representation, photography and film can become instruments in the service of revolutionary, progressive politics that stands far away from the claws of Fascism.

BIBLIOGRAPHY.

Benjamin, Walter. “Little History of Photography” in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, ed. by Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, trans. by Rodney Livingstone and Others (London: THE BELKNAP PRESS OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1999), pp. 507-530.

———  “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, Second Version” in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, ed. by Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin, trans. by Edmund Jephcott, Rodney Livingstone, Howard Eiland, and Others (London: THE BELKNAP PRESS OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2008), pp. 19-55.

Maria Chiara Caiazzo