STEVE-O Benjamin

Movies, unlike artistic photography, have too many interchangeable parts that constitute the whole. The screenplay, the actors, the sets, the wardrobe, the directors, the camera men, the editor…. What makes art “True” is that intangible that Benjamin calls AURA.

What the HELL is his meaning of “CULT”, I mean come on DuDe, if your going to use …or reproduce…the phrase in a new way, you first have to define it for your audience. Because right now it has no cult value for me, just an exhibitory value,
How many times can I write cult…cult…cult…cult.

Benjamin writes, “Nothing more strikingly shows that art has left the realm of the beautiful ‘semblance’ which, so far, had been taken to be the only sphere where art could thrive” (27). First thoughts on this statement reflect Habermas’ idea of spheres of Postmodernism. This sphere is void of experts in Benjamin’s view. The public is in control of this realm. But I don’t agree with the fact that art was stuck or was in a realm of beautiful semblance to begin with. If by beautiful semblance he is referring to the ability to reflect the intended reality on film then this would be a sense of increased semblance, yet a depthlessness in reality. I had flash backs to previous texts in Benjamin’s account of the actor behind the camera. First of Barthes and his notion that,

The pleasure of the text [film] is that moment when my body pursues its own ideas—for my body does not have the same ideas I do.

I don’t think any medium can relate more to our concept of POMO then film. The Simulacra and reification of everything we know or knew. Is film not the greatest attempt at Verisimilitude?

The phenomenon of feeling, which engulf an actor, according to Benjamin, reflect the same concept Jameson wanted to express in the breakdown in the signifying chain,

Suddenly engulfs the subject with undescribable vividness, a materiality of perception properly overwhelming, which effectively dramatizes the power of the material—or better still, the literal—Sigifier in isolation. (501)

This seems similar to Pirandello’s idea of a contributing, “oppression, that new anxiety which, grips the actor before the camera" (27). Is this anxiety a quasi-aura which realizes, in Lyotard’s view, “the appropriate remedy for the anxiety and depression the public experience?” In this sense does film act as an “instrument of magic” (23) or contain a ritualistic component, which would be the binary opposite of arts evolution from cult to exhibition. Film would be first an exhibitionistic artform whose cult value later may be recognized as incidental? Wholly SH%$, am I starting to grasp the whole CULT thingy? I go one more time back to Jameson and ask, “Can we identify some ‘moment of truth’ within the more evident ‘moments of falsehood (514),” of film?

In response to Habermas’ idea that Capitalism or this extension of modernism would create a larger rift between the spheres of the expert and that of the public, Benjamin points out that due to the extension of the press, “the distinction between author and public is about to lose its basic character” (28).

I don't like Benjamin's comparison betwwen film analysis and psychoanalysis, "The Camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses" (31). I would think that stage acting would inevidably lend itself to this comparison more so then a filmed environment where things are not LIVE and can be reshot over and over. It's similar to a first person strory wherea s we dont have a reliable narrator. On the stage the audience will see the action in real time and can observe these so called unconscious "slips of the tongue" (30).

I love Duhamel's opinion on the Hollywoodization of film. The truth is that 98% of movies today are CRAP! they are not designed to provike thought or contemplation, they are strictly commercial money-makers whose sole porpose is to entertain. Benjamin's incorporation of Duhamel's theory is way off course though, I agree that Distarction and concentration are binaery opposites. But, I think they are the binay opposite of his view...let me explain, If a person is concentrating before a work of art he is not absorbed by it but rather Absorbs it. The viewer becomes one with the art... In contrast a distractd viewer does not absorb the work of art but rather is absorbed by it..the art becomes one with the viewer...I hope that makes sense.

I think I’ll stop now….

“PERFECTION IS PERFECTED IN MY LAND OF UNDERSTAND” Snoop

ONE.