Film Materials
I want to focus our attention to two sequences from Eisenstein’s October. The first is the “montage of the gods” (29:30-34:30); the second is the “Fraternizing” sequence (42:00-43:20).
The montage of the gods occurs right after a moment of rising tension in the film. We’ve just learned that Kerensky has reinstated the death penalty, and General Kornilov is advancing toward Petrograd. As the intertitle puts it, “the revolution is in danger,” punctuated by a loud steam whistle sounding the alarm. Then, the intertitles read: “Defend Petrograd! . . . In the name of God and Country. . . . In the name of God . . . .” The montage shows, among other things, Eastern Orthodox Jesus, a Tibetan deity, the Buddha, a Chinese dragon, “primitive” carvings or totems, and much more. Around 32:30, the previously shown images of the statue of Tsar Alexander III are run in reverse, essentially restoring him to the throne, alongside the ironic intertitle, “Horray!”
I’m interested in the role of religious icons and sculptures—objects—as images in the montage. As I discuss in more detail below, Benjamin argues that the modern era is characterized by mode of perception that he calls “the decay of the aura,” in which the mechanical reproduction of art works liquidates them of their traditional value and function. Benjamin also claims that authentic works of art find their basis in ritual, magic, cult, and religion. Technological reproducibility severs the work of art from authenticity, which allows the art work to take on new roles—importantly, art as exhibition, which for Benjamin is linked to politics and indeed to film.
In this vein, I have a series of questions about the religious objects and images in the montage of the gods:
- Are the religious icons/objects auratic?
- Does October strip them of their aura, whatever that might mean? Does the film therefore also sever them from the various traditions and cultures that structure their reception and authenticity? If so, what are the stakes?
- What other roles might the religious images play in October? Are they a purely formal aspect of the montage device? (The state did accuse Eisenstein of being overly formalist and confusing the workers, after all.) Do they function as Benjamin thinks film art might, as exhibition and political propaganda?
The second scene depicts the fraternization of Russian and German troops after a peace treaty. The bulk of the montage is devoted to folk dance, some in medium-length shots where entire dancers can be seen, but much of it is close-ups on particular dancing body parts—feet, hands, and heads. The montage also includes shots of soldiers’ faces, which reveal that they are indeed fraternizing, enjoying the festivities.
I found this sequence notable for a number of reasons: it’s quasi-ethnographic; it aggressively employs montage in an almost fetishistic way to focus on parts of the dancers; and it sticks out as one of the more extra-diegetic parts of the film. Although it announces that a peace treaty has been signed, there’s no particular reason why the extended dancing sequences are necessary to the film’s narrative. In short, the Fraternizing montage is excessive, but also revealing of what Benjamin calls “the optical unconscious” (37), the way in which “the camera comes into play, with all its resources for swooping and rising, disrupting and isolating, stretching or compressing a sequence, enlarging or reducing an object” (37).
I don’t have particular questions for this section; I simply offer it up for contemplation in light of Benjamin’s conviction (not all that different from Vertov’s more aggressively argued Kino-eye) that we must account for the new “equilibrium between human beings and the apparatus” (37, emphasis removed).
Benjamin’s “The Work of Art”
As Prof. O’Sullivan mentioned when we first met, entire courses can be (and are) structured around an explication of Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” or “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” if you want to be fussy about it. Given the enormous weight of the essay’s reception, I’m excited to share my thoughts with you, but also mindful of Benjamin’s difficulties and resistance to interpretation.
I’d like to offer one brief introductory comment to orient my summary. Benjamin is working in the tradition of Marxist aesthetics—a discourse that even sympathetic readers find it difficult to enter into. For purposes of our discussion, I suggest that we set Marxism to the side. Instead, we would do well to remember that “The Work of Art” is in conversation with contemporary debates in art history, especially with Alois Riegl’s theory of Kunstwollen, which is “the manner in which a specific culture seeks to give form, color, and line to its art.” For Riegl, “Works of art . . . are thus the clearest source of a very particular kind of historical information. They encode not just the character of the artistic production of the age, but the character of parallel features of the society: its religion, philosophy, ethical structure, and institutions” (Jennings 2008, 10). Put differently, art works are not autonomous; they are produced by humans embedded in societies. Thus, the interpretation of art yields information about the society that produced the art, and vice-versa. In my view, this is all the “Marxism” we need in order to understand Benjamin’s desire to “defin[e] the tendencies of the development of art under the present conditions of production” (Benjamin 2008, 19; 666).
Authenticity, Tradition, Temporality, Mass Reproduction
For Benjamin, authenticity is a key criterion of the artwork. Authenticity is connected to a tradition. A tradition means that an artwork was created at a particular time and place—of which it bears traces—and passed down to the present unadulterated, unchanged. Thus Seurat paints A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte from 1884-86, it’s exhibited in Paris alongside other Impressionist work, the Art Institute of Chicago acquires it in 1924, and this very moment you can see A Sunday Afternoon in the Windy City. You stand before it, witness to a tradition. The painting is substantially as it was in 1886; it is authentic, and so is your experience of it. For Benjamin, it is impossible to have this kind of experience standing before a photograph or video installation. “The whole sphere of authenticity eludes technological—and of course not only technological—reproduction” (21, emphasis removed). Why? Because technological (or mechanical) reproduction both distorts the original (by manipulating it, blowing it up, reducing it, etc.) and rips the artwork from its time and place of origin, and in doing so interrupts its “physical duration,” so key to Benjamin’s understanding of tradition (22). What is at stake is nothing less than the artwork’s “authority,” as no one can testify to the authenticity of a work that, having been mechanically duplicated, can now pop in and out of historical time. In Benjamin’s formula, “the technology of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the sphere of tradition. By replicating the work many times over, it substitutes a mass existence for a unique experience” (22, emphasis removed). Mechanical reproduction culminates in film, the agent of “the liquidation of the value of tradition in the cultural heritage” (22).
Mode of Perception, Aura, Art’s Value
In the Marxist view of the world, there are various modes of production—asiatic, ancient, feudal, capitalist, socialist, and so on—each of which corresponds to a particular way of production and social relations. Under contemporary capitalism, for example, we expect the production of goods and ideas on a global scale via integrated markets backed by states, contracts, private property, and so on. Feudalism, on the other hand, features a different cast of characters: lords and serfs, nobility and theocracy, the predominance of craft production, and so on. Each historical period is characterized by some mode (or mix of modes) of production.
In the same way, Benjamin argues, “just as the entire mode of existence of human collectivities changes over long historical periods, so too does their mode of perception” (23, emphasis removed). This is Riegl’s Kunstwollen. Riegl, however, was working on late-antique Roman art; Benjamin wants to bring us to the present. He boldly claims that “the medium of present-day perception can be understood as a decay of the aura” (23). Benjamin defines the aura as “a strange tissue of space and time: the unique apparition of a distance, however near it may be” (23). The aura is a kind of action at a distance, where an object reaches out and touches the observer’s soul. Another way to think about it is, an object’s aura is its objecthood asserting itself. I recognize that these definitions are hopelessly vague, but so is Benjamin on this count. I’ll try one more definition: The aura is all the aspects of the experience of a piece of art that are lost if experience is reduced to pure looking by, say, the flattening out an object to a photographic print. The best personal example I can give is Richard Serra’s Torqued Ellipses, which are on display at Dia Beacon in upstate New York. They have a hieratic quality that’s hard to put into words. Given Benjamin’s hypothesis about the connection between ritual and aura (24-5), perhaps my reaction to the Ellipses isn’t so surprising.
Benjamin associates the decay of aura with the desire of the masses to get as close to the artwork as possible, preferably in the form of a mechanical reproduction (23). The masses, in short, desire the destruction of uniqueness in favor of sameness, which results in a loss of authenticity. In Benjamin’s estimation, “as soon as the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applied to artistic production, the whole social function of art is revolutionized. Instead of being founded on ritual, it is based on a different practice: politics” (25, emphasis removed). Or a “politics of art,” anyway (20). Liberated from ritual, raised to its highest form in film, film art’s function or role as “exhibition value” (25) “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” (26, emphasis removed).
References
Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008.
Michael W. Jennings, “The Production, Reproduction, and Reception of the Work of Art,” in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, 9-18.