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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:

1. Are the religious icons/objects auratic?
2. 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?
3. 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.

Roland Barthes’ “The Reality Effect” and Leo Braudy’s “The Open and the Closed” have at least one primary focus in common: they are each concerned with details, objects, descriptions that do not carry apparent meaning for the narrative of a story. The presence of these “useless details,” to borrow Barthes’ term, lends a given work—novels for Barthes and films for Braudy—the illusion of reality. Barthes makes this point when he returns to examples of useless details in Madame Bovary cited at the beginning of the piece to arrive at his conclusion: “…Flaubert’s barometer, Michelet’s little door finally say nothing but this: we are the real; it is the category of “the real” (and not its contingent contents) which is then signified; in other words, the very absence of the signified, to the advantage of the referent alone, becomes the very signifier of realism: the reality effect is produced…” (148). In humbler terms, if a detail is noted but that detail does not signify some deeper meaning with the other elements of the story, it’s inclusion now serves no other purpose but to represent reality.

Along the same lines, Braudy uses the inclusion of details like this as the basis for his distinction between two kinds of film, the open and the closed. A closed film contains nothing that does not signify, connect, or relate to something else: “In a closed film the world of the film is the only thing that exists; everything within it has its place in the plot of the film—every object, every character, every gesture, every action” (46). The details in the films Braudy describes here are never useless; they all carry meaning, and they are all created by the filmmaker within the self-sufficient world of the film. An open film, by contrast, suggests that a world exists outside the film and that not everything included in the gaze of the camera is tied to the story. Braudy writes, “In an open film the world of the film is a momentary frame around an ongoing reality… unlike the objects and people in a closed film, the story of the open film does not exhaust the meaning of what it contains” (46-47). (Even though I don’t do it here, I hope we get into the Mungiu film in terms of a world that goes on before and after the film, especially given Mungiu’s comments in the contextual interview about the camera and the characters.)

Returning to useless details, I’m interested in the term reality effect because it already acknowledges the deception or illusion involved in representing reality. This language reminds me of the André Bazin reading because he too is interested in illusion and deception, but I get the feeling that, based on “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” he might object to my outright comparison of Barthes’ reality effect in a novel and the realism of an open film according to Braudy. This objection, in my mind, would stem from the perceived difference in the act of reproducing reality between a writer and a cameraperson. Bazin writes in his article that an image of reality produced by a painter is fundamentally different than an image produced through the technology of a camera: “No matter how skillful the painter, his work was always in fee to an inescapable subjectivity. The fact that a human hand intervened cast a shadow of doubt over the image” (161). He goes on to propose a relative effect of the personality of the artist on the image being reproduced and the importance of the technology of a camera in limiting that effect. “For the first time an image of the world is formed automatically, without the creative intervention of man. The personality of the photographer enters into the proceedings on in his selection of the object to be photographed and by way of the purpose he has in mind.” Suppose I were to extend this from painter to writer: is it necessary that a novelist leaves some mark on a useless detail contributed in the name of realism in a way that a filmmaker would not by choosing what to include in a shot? If so, we have an important distinction based on the difference between the means of reproduction and the alleged objectivity provided by the camera.

The lines in the above discussion are blurry to me already, but my grasp on the concepts become even more muddled when I attempt to apply these theories to 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, or to distinguish between useless and useful details. For some details I am more or less confident of their uselessness, such as the fact that Palmolive soap gives Gabita dandruff. (A corresponding useful detail from Deadwood would be the fact that Jane has a connection with the little girl that later survives the attack on her family). I see direct parallels between this inclusion of the soap brand and Barthes analysis of a useless detail: “…and in Michelet’s sentence, we have the same difficulty in accounting structurally for all the details: that the executioner came after the painter is all that is necessary to the account; how long the sitting lasted, the dimension and location of the door are useless (but the theme of the door, the softness of death’s knock have an indisputable symbolic value)” (142). Just like the theme of the door, the necessity of a black market in the co-ed dorm for items like soap and cigarettes has symbolic value. But the exact brand of soap, like the “length of the sitting” and the “dimension and location of the door,” signifies nothing except reality.

Specifically, I am confused over a category of details including things like the plastic sheet, the knife, the presence of the police in the hotel lobby, and the fact that the doctor left his ID card at the desk. All of these are details that could have had meaning but didn’t. I’m sure I’m not alone in immediately thinking of Chekhov’s gun when Otilia stole the doctor’s knife from his bag. However, rather than signifying reality and nothing else, this category of details seems to signify the goal of the film as articulated by director Cristian Mungiu in the contextual interview provided alongside the readings and viewings: “Everything we put in the film in terms of style was to show the inner state of mind of this main character. The film is not about what happened: It’s about what could have happened—if the abortionist doesn’t show up, if the police show up. It’s a film about Otilia’s fears. It’s a film about someone with empathy for someone else.” If the point of the film is to tell a realistic story, if a primary goal is to achieve the reality effect, now it seems like this category of details does carry specific meaning for the narrative. Mungiu’s knife is an anti-Chekhov’s gun because, though it doesn’t reenter the plot, it is still a crucial aspect of the narrative about Otilia’s fears that Mungiu sought to capture.

Before wrapping up, I’d like to return to the differences rather than similarities between the Barthes and Braudy readings. Whereas the category of details mentioned above that relate to what didn’t happen seem not to match Barthes definition of details that do not signify, it is this category that to me best matches Braudy’s characterization of an open film. Specifically, I am reminded of Braudy’s competing imagery between the role of the open and closed filmmaker as different kinds of Gods: “If Lang’s films express a world of totally enclosed and self-sufficient meaning, Renoir’s exhibit a garden of potential flowers and weeds alike. Lang is God as the head of the spy ring and Renoir is God as the chief gardener” (49). Mungiu seems to have intentionally placed himself as the second sort of God, where things like his knife and forgotten plastic sheet are weeds, but they are, somewhat ironically, weeds that have been carefully cultivated. And yet, even as I make this distinction between Barthes and Braudy, the idea of carefully cultivated weeds seems to harken back to Barthes emphasis on the illusion of reality rather than reality itself, perhaps almost collapsing the distinction I’ve been trying to draw.

In turning towards class discussion, I have a few discussion questions/thing to bring up. I hope we spend some time on Deadwood and 4 Months comparatively, especially examining the aspects of the first episode of Deadwood that seem to match (or not) the closed film description. I’d also like to bring up the ending of 4 Months and to what degree it feels like Braudy’s assertion that: “The open film ends instead by focusing on the irresolvable in relationships and stories.” We can also bring in what the Ebert contextual review has to say about the ending as either “inevitable” or “anticlimactic.” I have a few additional questions that go beyond what I was able to touch on in the blog post, but I doubt we would be able to/want to get to all of them. What are the implications of the “closed” and “open” discussion on our viewing experience according to Braudy and how does that apply to what we’ve watched so far? How do you reconcile Bazin’s insistence on the mechanical objectivity of the camera with photography and the addition of dialogue or other elements of film (before editing) in cinema that seem more like a painting than a photograph? Can we frame some of the early film viewings we saw as examples of Bazin’s claim that “cinema is objectivity in time”? And can we also explore his suggestion that “the photograph allows us on the one hand to admire in reproduction something that our eyes alone could not have taught us to love, and on the other, to admire the painting as a thing in itself whose relation to something in nature has ceased to be the justification for its existence” (194)? Is it fair, for example, to say that we could consider the mis-en-scène as the photograph in this comparison and the film in total as the painting?

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