Benjamin at the Movies Aura, Gaze and History in the Artwork Essay

Orbis Litterarum 48: 109-134, 1993 Printed in Denmark . All rights reserved

Copyright Q Munksgaurd 1993

ORBIS Zi t temm ISSN 0105-7510

Benjamin at the Movies Aura, Gaze and History in the Artwork Essay

Peter Larsen, University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway

The paper discusses Walter Benjamin’s Artwork essay from 1935 in a psycho-historical perspective, arguing that Benjamin’s suggestive, metaphorical text may be read as an (often highly subjective) account of how the new visual media could be experienced by a sensitive spectator - when they were really new. The paper is first and foremost a reading of these usually neglected “literary” or “textual” aspects of the Artwork essay, focusing on Benjamin’s discussion of “auratic” and “non-auratic” experiences. It is argued that there is a series of evident connections between these descriptions and the modes of visual experience which psychoanalytical theory conceptualizes as the “libidinous gaze” and the “archaic, phallic-sadistic gaze.” It is further shown that these more general modes of reception are articulated in a historically specific form in Benjamin’s text, and the paper argues that it is necessary to account for these articulations in order to fully understand Benja- min’s notion of the cinema as a field in which a merging of analytical “criticism” and aesthetic “enjoyment” can take place.

*

“I had come to Riga to visit a friend. Her house, the city, the language were unknown to me. Nobody expected me, I was known by no one. For two hours I walked the streets alone. And I did not see her. Out of every door a flame was bursting, sparks were flying from every cornerstone, every streetcar came rushing by like a fire engine. For she could indeed step out of this door, turn that corner, sit in the tram. But of the two of us, I had at every cost to be the first one who saw the other. For if she had directed the fuse of her gaze a t me - I would have blown up like an ammunition depot.”

(EINBAHNSTRASSE)

*

1. “Ziemlich Grauenhaft!” Skovbostrand near Svendborg, the summer of 1938: Walter Benjamin is staying with Bertolt Brecht in his Danish exile.

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I have a large undisturbed garden at my disposal and my writing desk by a window with a free view over the sound. Except for the daily pause of chess with Brecht, the small ships passing through the sound are, as a matter of fact, my only distraction’.

When he is not playing chess or looking at ships, he writes what will later be known as “Uber einige Motive bei Baudelaire.”’

Brecht makes a note in his Arbeitsjournal, July 25: “benjamin is here. he is working on an essay on ba~delaire”~. Some parts are “good,” “useful reading material,” but there are some serious problems too: Benjamin is writing about

something he calls aura which is related to dreams (daydreams). he says: when you feel a gaze being directed at you, even if it is directed at your back, you answer it (?) the expectation of being looked at by something you are looking at yourself, creates the aura (14).

Brecht seems to be surprised - which is a bit odd: Benjamin’s Baudelaire- draft does contain a very brief section on aura but nothing compared to his comprehensive introduction and discussion of the concept in “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproduction” from 1936.4 Has Brecht not read this? - The notebook entry continues:

[the aura] has apparently been decaying lately, together with the cultic. b has discovered this by analyzing films, here the aura is decaying because of the reproduction of works of art (ibid.).

So, Brecht knows the Artwork essay after all. But (“apparently”) only from hearsay. On the other hand, he is quite capable of delivering a verdict:

the whole thing is sheer mysticism, in spite of an attitude against mysticism. this is the way the materialist conception of history is adapted! it is quite awful! (ibid.).

Not redly awful, but quite: After much beating about the bush, Brecht is his own sweet self again - meticulous, precise.

Behind Brecht’s evasive, ironic and exasperated notebook entry lies the well-known, sad story: At the time when Benjamin wrote the Artwork essay, he was heavily inspired by Brecht’s special brand of materialism. A French version was accepted for publication by Zeitschrgt f i r Sozialforschung, but Benjamin felt that his radicalism could find a more perceptive audience elsewhere and hoped that a German version could be printed in the Moscow- based communist journal Internationale Literarur. When the party members

Benjamin at the Movies 111

reacted with eloquent silence, he dropped the plan and tried instead Das Wort, another Moscow-based journal, one that counted Brecht among its editors. Once more the strange cocktail of aura and materialism was badly received and the essay was refused: “Quite awful!”’

The French version was published as planned by his exiled Frankfurt friends - whose attitude was just as unsympathetic as that of his communist friends, albeit for other reasons: They were alarmed by its heavyhanded materialism which in their opinion was a direct result of Brecht’s unhealthy influence. Benjamin received sharp, but urbane criticism from Adorno - who later told his students that Benjamin, afraid of the demonic Brecht, had written the Artwork essay in a childish attempt to outbid his vulgar radicalism. “Quite awful!”6

Once again Benjamin had placed himself zwischen den Stiihlen, between the stools: With his writings on aura he succeeded in provoking two camps of radical intellectuals. And the provocative effect did certainly not wear off as time went by. The first generations of Benjamin scholars were just as repelled by the mystical concept as his contemporaries had been and, signifi- cantly, none of his texts were exposed to a rougher, more insensitive treatment than precisely the Artwork essay. It was criticized for its unorthodox periodiz- ations of art and media history, for its bizarre conclusions about the emanci- patory potential of the new visual media, for its strangely naive, political prognoses etc., etc. - and all of these problems were usually (and not entirely without reason) blamed on this strange, unfortunate concept with its trouble- some connotations of eastern mysticism. “Quite awful!”

While the Artwork essay until quite recently was considered a texfe maudit by most Benjamin philologists (and particularly by the fraction of adornite hardliners), radical art historians, media researchers and media workers have shown a far more forthcoming attitude: Since the essay was rediscovered in the late 1960s, it has entered the curriculum of media and cultural studies programmes in many parts of the world and has become standard inventory in anthologies and readers etc. - for a number of good reasons.

All evident shortcomings notwithstanding, the essay is obviously an important historicaI document. In the history of early media theory it is an instructive counterpart to Adorno and Horkheimers’ uncompromising, strait- laced rejection of the “Culture Industry”’ - and as such an indication of decisive divisions within the Frankfurt School on the subject of contemporary mass culture. In the broader history of aesthetics it is an example of an early

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“theory of the avant-garde”: Though the historical significance of the new visual media is Benjamin’s main concern, his radical rewriting of art history concluding with the “destruction of aura” can also be read as an attempt at establishing a broader historical and conceptual framework for contemporary attacks on the very Institution Kunst, i.e. as a theoretical parallel to the practice of avant-garde movements like Dada, futurism, surrealism, etc.’

On the other hand, the Artwork essay is not solely a historical document. In contemporary media and cultural studies it is also referred to, discussed, and criticized as a living text - which obviously has to do with the undeveloped character of a specific field of research: Among vast amounts of (mostly quantitative, but in later years even a growing number of quantitatively oriented) empirical studies, the Artwork essay stands out as one of the very few texts attempting to deal with the question of media reception from a historical and theoretical point of view.

A historical document; a (problematic, awkward, if not “awful”) theoretical text - yes, indeed, the Artwork essay is all this. And more. Benjamin himself called it, modestly, an “Aufsatz,” an article, but it is after all an essay - and a very beautiful one, a strong, carefully written text with obvious literary qualities. Its forceful imagery; its suggestive, lyrical passages; its strange metaphorical “illustrations” and “examples” - these “textual” qualities (which none of Benjamin’s many readers and critics seem to have noticed or a t least cared to comment on) could very well be another reason why this much abused text is still living, still controversial, still read with considerable fascination in spite of all deserved and undeserved criticism.

A “poetic,” “rhetorical” text, then. And, even read as such, a historical document, but now in a different sense. While the history of aesthetic experience is one of its “central” topics, the essay also documents - slightly “off- center” - concrete, historical experiences: Throughout the text, the historical and theoretical arguments are supported by examples of how people reacted to traditional and contemporary art as well as to the new visual media in the first decades of the century - a series of firsthand reports written by one extremely sensitive member of the audience who described and reflected on his own reactions in expressive images and metaphors that still reverberate, even in those readers who may find it difficult to come to terms with his genera1, theoretical and political arguments.

The intention of the following paper is not to open yet another discussion of these arguments but to focus on the aspects just mentioned - the neglected,


textual qualities of the essay; Benjamin’s textual reworking of his own concrete experiences. The first (and largest) part of the paper presents a simple, myopic reading of the essay, an attempt to take it “at its word,” to examine in detail the content of the metaphors, examples, descriptions etc. The relationship between what is actually said at this level of the text and Benjamin’s theoretical and historical generalizations is discussed in the final parts of the paper.

2. A Reading 2.1. In the first of fifteen small numbered chapters, Benjamin briefly discusses the history of reproduction, concluding that

[alround 1900 technical reproduction had reached a standard that not only permitted it to reproduce all transmitted works of art and thus to cause the most profound change in their impact upon the public, it had also captured a place of its own among the artistic processes. For the study of this standard nothing is more revealing than the nature of the repercussions that these two different manifestations - the reproduction of works of art and the art of the film - have had on art in its traditional form (138f.)9.

The rest of his text focuses on these “two different manifestations”: Chapters 11-V discuss “the reproduction of works of art” and its “impact upon the public;” the remaining chapters deal with “the art of the film.”

In the beginning of the “reproduction”-section (chapter 11) Benjamin remarks that even the most perfect reproduction is lacking in something, namely:

the here and now of the work of art - its unique existence [: einmalige Dasein] at the place where it is situated (139).

The “here and now” of Das Original [: the unique work] is the essence of “its authenticity [: Echtheit]” (ibid.) which in turn is

the quintessence of all in it that from its very beginning is transmissible, ranging from its material duration to its historical testimony (140).

Historical testimony is dependent on duration and, together, these two aspects constitute the very “authority of the object.” (ibid.) This authority is destroyed when the work of art is reproduced. - Then it comes:

What disappears here can be summed up in the concept of aura [...I what withers away in the work of art in the age of its technical reproduction is its aura (141).

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Nothing mystical here: A series of interrelated “historical” qualities - unique existence, authenticity, authority - is summed up in a single word. At this very first, almost casual, appearance ‘Laura” serves as a mere heading, as a practical textual label. Later, of course, it turns out to be much more than this, and everything becomes more complicated, but the function of the term remains the same. Throughout the essay it is used to represent, to condense or subsume, a larger field - and it is this field that becomes increasingly complex as the textual movement proceeds.

A label; a textual focal point; a metaphor - or, to use Benjamin’s own term, a “concept.” But a special kind of concept, one that cannot be defined once and for all: Aura “grows” with and out of the context; its meaning is constantly being defined and redefined as new arguments, new examples and illustrations are added to the text.

There is, of course, the passage in chapter I11 where Benjamin actually does suggest a more traditional, more explicit, definition, but it is quite significant that what he really offers here is just another metaphor: Having made the initial remarks on the unique object, he finds it “advisable” (142) to “illustrate” (ibid.) the aura of historical, man-made objects by “the concept of an aura of natural objects.” (ibid.) A definition, indeed, but of something else, of something “similar.” This is only one of many examples of Benjamin’s fundamentally metaphorical strategy: An argument is supported by being displaced, moved into another field; the text makes a short detour and when it returns to the original track, it is “augmented,” “enriched,” new dimensions, new shades of meaning have been added.

2.2. The other type of aura, that of “natural objects,” is defined

as the unique appearance of a distance, however close it may be [: einmalige Erscheinung einer Ferne, so nah sie sein mag].

(Ibid. )

“Uniqueness,” once again; this time not the unique existence of an object, but a uniquely “appearing” distance.

After the definition follow the two famous, oft quoted, examples:

If, while resting on a summer afternoon, you follow with your eyes a mountain range on the horizon or a branch which casts its shadow over you, you inhale the aura of those mountains, of that branch.

(Ibid.)


Benjamin’s otherwise sympathetic biographer, Werner Fuld, reacts strongly against this: “It is indeed strangely defined what aura actually should be.” (Fuld, op.cit. p.268.) Commenting on the quoted passages, he writes:

“This may very well be a poetic text, but it is certainly not a scientific or philosophical definition. It explains nothing but needs explanation”

(opci t . , p.269.)

Insensitive to Benjamin’s metaphorical strategy, Fuld entirely misses the crucial point - that the whole argument of the essay is based exactly on this short ‘‘poetic text.” Benjamin is actually very precise and explicit here: By means of his two examples he demonstrates that the concept of aura is based on the model of visual perception, that its fundamental figure is that of a subject looking at an object.

In other words: The aura is not really “of” the mountain range on the horizon or “of” the branch nearby; it refers to a complex, contradictory quality of experience produced by a particular constellation between subject and object: Aura is the subject’s sudden and “einmalige” experience of a distance - “however close [the object] may be” - as opposed to non-auratic experiences which are said to fulfil “the desire of contemporary masses to bring things “closer” spatially and humanly” (ibid.).

An experience of distance, then; distance in space, but also in time: The remarks on “natural objects” were only meant to “illustrate” the aura of “historical objects” which, as we know, is related to historicity, to “authenticity” and “authority.” In chapter I1 Benjamin wrote that the history of a given object

includes the changes which it may have suffered in physical condition over the years as well as the various changes in ownership. The traces of the first can be revealed only by chemical and physical analyses I...]; changes of ownership are subject to a tradition which must be traced from the situation of the original

(1 39).

Historical objects are “Spuren,” traces, - material signs referring to past situations that can be traced backwards in time from the present “here and now.” And if we return to the crucial passages in chapter I1 and read them, as Benjamin intended them to be read, through his “advisable illustration,” we understand that the aura of a work of art is neither a quality in the object itself (: the meaning of the sign or its historical referent), nor its unique existence, but - as in the case of natural objects - the subject’s unique experience of a specific, spatial and temporal, distance between the “einmalige

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Dasein” of the sign and its absent referent, as well as between the subject’s own position “here and now,” in front of the object, and the immaterial “there and then” suggested by that object.

Later on Benjamin uses “contemplation” as synonymous with auratic experiences - a term which in his earlier writings was associated with allegory, melancholia, and mourning: Contemplating an allegorical work of art, the subject reflects on the absent referent, the immaterial “there and then,” but the melancholy work of mourning, the Trauerarbeit, is first and foremost an attempt at coming to terms with the very phenomenon of distance, separation - with the gap between sign and referent. In the Artwork essay “contemplation” carries similar connotations, but another aspect of the term is emphasized as well.

The wanderer on the hillside “follows” the mountain range or the branch: he is mimicking, imitating the objects with his body - or at least with the movement of the eyes. And “to follow” the objects “is simply [: das heifit] to inhale the aura of those mountains, of that branch” (142). As the contemplative subject produces an incorporeal, fleeting copy of the object, the gap is in a way closed: the aura is “inhaled,” i.e. the very experience of distance and separation is absorbed, incorporated.

And if once more we apply Benjamin’s example to his argument about man-made objects, his metaphorical “illustration” suggests that contemplation of works of art may be understood similarly, as a mimetic process, as a kind of mental and bodily re-creation of the object in question. The subject is identifying with the work of art, incorporating it and, even incorporating the experience of distance, making it a part of himself.

2.3. Reproduction destroys the aura of works of art: As the “unique phenomenon” dissolves in identical copies, the decisive relation between sign and referent, between “material duration” and “historical testimony,” becomes uncertain and the “historical authority” is put in jeopardy - or in Benjamin’s own words: “ins Wanken” (: the authority “is tottering” (140)).

At first, this process is described by means of a spatial metaphor of the same kind as the ones that turn up in chapter 111: Reproduction “enables the original to meet the beholder halfway” (140), it breaks down the distance between object and subject. But later on we learn that when a work of art is brought closer to the spectator, its “most sensitive nucleus” (ibid.) is touched. The consequence is “a tremendous shattering of all that has been


handed down, a shattering of tradition” (141). And Benjamin goes on talking about the film’s “destructive, cathartic aspect, that is, the liquidation of the traditional value of the cultural heritage” (ibid.). Later on he compares the destruction of the aura with “Die Entschalung des Gegenstandes aus seiner Hulle” (143) - i.e. a fine veil covering the object is being peeled or ripped off.

Thus, as the textual movement proceeds, the spatial metaphors give way to images of violence, destruction, degradation, and even of rape. And contrary to what one might expect, these metaphors are intended to emphasize the positive aspects of the process: The “traditional values” are not worth preserving. To witness their destruction is a redeeming, “cathartic” experience. And a way of gaining new insight: As the “cultural heritage” is destroyed and the last veils fall, hidden things become visible, all the uncanny secrets of the old order are suddenly revealed. The impact of photography is one example of this: It gave the “secular cult of beauty” its “first, hard shattering” and made its “foundation,” its “parasitic dependence on [: Dasein am] the ritual,” “evident,” (144) visible for all to see.

The violent imagery reappears (but with a somewhat different emphasis) as Benjamin moves on to discuss the new media in the “film”-section of the essay. The short chapter on photography (VI) serves as a kind of pivot between the two sections:

Early portrait photos still had some auratic qualities: They possessed a “melancholy, incomparable beauty” (148). Serving as an element in “the cult of remembrance of loved ones, absent or dead [...I the fleeting expression of a human face” (ibid.) could be the object of melancholy contemplation. However, things change “as man withdraws from the photographic image” (zbid.). Benjamin’s prime example is the French photographer Eugkne Atget who captured the deserted streets of Paris at break of dawn:

It has quite justly been said of him that he photographed them like scenes of crime. The scene of a crime, too, is deserted; it is photographed for the purpose of establishing clues [: Indizien]. With Atget, photographs become standard evidence in the trial of history [: im historischen Prozess]. They demand a specific kind of approach; free-floating contemplation is not appropriate to them. They alarm the viewer; he feels that he has to search for a new way to them.

(Ib id. )

A spectator contemplating an auratic work of art is free to follow his own flow of associations as he reflects on the gap between material trace and absent referent. Modern photos are traces too but, as the metaphors of

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“crime”, “clues”, and “evidence” imply, their “historical testimony” is of a different nature: they point towards a hidden, secret meaning. Melancholy, brooding reflection on the experience of distance and separation is inadequate in this case. The photos demand to be interpreted, they invite the alarmed spectator to bridge the gap, to search for the referent, to solve a riddle.

In this new landscape of enigmatic images the spectator was at first helped by the written captions which served him as a kind of “signposts,” (ibid.) and the directives of the captions soon became

even more precise and more demanding [: gebieterisch] in the film where the meaning of each single picture appears to be prescribed by the sequence of all preceding ones.

(Ibid.)

Thus, a new kind of authority is installed with the appearance of the new media: Issuing their directives they interpellate the spectator in a “gebieterisch” way. What they demand is not melancholy contemplation but to be read - and read correctly.

2.4. A subject, looking: In the beginning was the wanderer - who was actually just a stand-in. Resting on the hillside, he represented the contemplative spectator. As the text moved on this figure was replaced by the modern, alarmed, searching spectator.

A subject, looking - at an object: first at natural phenomena and historical, man-made works of art, then at modern images, photos, films.

Before the image-object was created, there was another subject - a painter, a photographer, a cameraman - who looked at another object. This original “external” subject/ object-relationship is in a way “stored” in the final image, captured, transformed into an “internal” phenomenon: Looking at the image, the spectator sees what the first subject once saw, and sees it the way it was seen then. All images, old as well as new ones, are frozen memories, material fixations of subjective gazes, recordings of subjective views of reality.

The way in which this relationship between “external” and “internal” gazes is articulated in and by the modern, “moving images” is Benjamin’s central theme in the second part of his essay. His point of departure is the following observation:

In order to experience an image, any image, the spectator must first of all come to terms with its “internal gaze” - which in the case of the moving images means that he must accept the way in which reality is being represented by the


camera, by the cinematic apparatus: Before “identifying with” the actors on the screen, the cinema audience must necessarily “identify with the apparatus. Therefore the audience adopts the attitude of the apparatus [...I.”

(151)

This is an observation one may find in many, contemporary as well as later, works on film theory,Io but Benjamin draws a quite original conclusion: the attitude of the apparatus, adopted by the audience, is “that of testing.” (Zbid.)

This analysing and testing attitude is first discussed at the level of the apparatus itself, i.e. as an “internal” phenomenon. The fate of the film actors is Benjamin’s starting point:

A theatre actor works with his whole body in front of a live audience. He is engaged in an auratic activity; the “aura is tied to his here and now.”

(152)

Transferred to the film studio, the actor’s live performance, “here and now,” is observed by a mechanical eye, recorded by a “dead” camera. And just as the aura of works of art is destroyed in the process of reproduction, so is that of the film actor - for, unlike the live theatre audience, a camera “needs not respect the performance as an integral whole” (150): It subjects the performance “to a series of optical tests” (ibid.). In the film studio an actor is just another “stage prop” (152).

Auratic phenomena (: a work of art; the actor’s body) are being cut up by the camera as if they were dead objects - and this is, in fact, the camera’s way of dealing with everything it observes: The analysing and testing apparatus has “penetrated [...I deeply into reality” (157). Benjamin supports this argument with yet another “illustration”: The quite peculiar metaphors that follow in chapter XI are meant to serve as a “Hilfskonstruktion” (ibid.) - which in itself is a metaphor.“ Originally a mathematical term, it refers to the strategy of extending the lines of a geometrical figure in order to solve a difficult problem or prove a rule.

Benjamin extends the lines of his problem - the camera’s penetration of reality - by comparing the work of an “operating surgeon” to that of a “magician,” thereby suggesting that reality is, at least as a starting point, thought of as analogous to the body, i.e. as a living, human or humanized totality. A magician who “heals a sick person by the laying on of hands [...I maintains the natural distance between the patient and himself” (ibid.). In other words: the magician mimics the alien body with his hand just like the

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wanderer who creates an incorporeal copy of the distant mountain range by following it with his eyes. A surgeon, on the other hand,

greatly diminishes the distance between himself and the patient by penetrating into the patient’s body, and increases it but little by the caution with which his hand moves among the organs. In short, in contrast to the magician - who is still hidden in the medical practitioner - the surgeon at the decisive moment abstains from facing the patient man to man: rather, it is through the operation that he penetrates into him.

(Zbid.)

The magician and the surgeon (: also referred to as “healer” and “operator”) are metaphors: their relationship “compares to that between painter and cameraman,” (ibid.) and the point of this rhetorical “Hilfskonstruktion” is to underline the decisive contrast between auratic and non-auratic creativity: The painter maintains a “natural distance” to his auratic object, i.e. to reality experienced as a human body. Like the magician, he copies or mimics the object with his hands, whereas the analysing and operating cameraman uses the inhuman apparatus to force his way “into the web of that which is immediately given” (ibid.).

Consequently, the painter’s final image is a “total one” (ibid.) while the cameraman produces “multiple fragments which are assembled under a new law” (&id.). Later on Benjamin compares the result of the operating analysis to a “preparation,” a “muscle of a body” laid bare for scientific purposes (1 61). Cut free by the surgeon’s knife the muscle reveals the secrets of the body and its diseases. The operating cameraman, who abstains from facing reality “man to man,” produces new knowledge in the same way: Destroying the totality of the object, focusing on isolated details, framing, enlarging etc., he makes hidden things visible - thereby extending “our comprehension of the necessities which rule our lives” (ibid.). And as the object world is reduced to a series of fragments organized “scientifically” according to “a new law,” its enchantment is finally broken - which is why films are capable of assuring us

of an immense and unexpected field of action! Our taverns and our metropolitan streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories appeared to have us locked up hopelessly. Then came the film and burst this prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of seconds, so that now, in the midst of its far-flung ruins and debris, we calmly and adventurously go travelling (161).

Just as photography shattered the secular cult of beauty and made its “foundation” visible, the filmic explosion is shattering the metropolitan existence,


reducing it to ruins and debris, laying its necessities bare. As it appears, operative analysis is closely connected with, or results in, cathartic destruction. But, perhaps more important, this violent outburst is also a frank, expressive indication of the radical experience of dienation which is Benjam- in’s personal background for writing the essay:

The wanderer’s humanized, intimate, yet distant nature lies far behind us, we have moved into Modernity, into the grim reality of a modern metropolis - which, according to Benjamin, is like a prison: An alien object world is closing in on the subject, seizing it and abandoning it. In this situation the old painter’s humane, mimetic way of dealing with his object is totally inadequate; here is no hope of immediate reconciliation between subject and object. And precisely because the inhuman camera is freed from the obligation of facing reality “man to man,” the film may be charged with the responsi- bility of carrying out the only possible, radically redemptive action: Its historic task is to blow the stifling reality away in a great, liberating explosion.

2.5. Having discussed the relationship between camera and object, Benjamin returns to the “external” subject/object-relationship in the final chapters. His first step is to introduce yet another “Hilfskonstruktion:” the Dada movement.

The Dadaists aimed at a “relentless destruction of the aura of their creation” (164). The true Dada object made “contemplation and evaluation’’ impossible (ibid.). It was “a rifle shot. It hit the spectator” (ibid.) - in the same way as the film “jerkily assails the spectator” (ibid.) The film, then, may be seen as the true heir of Dada, as the Dada project continued with other, technically adequate, means, so to speak. The auratic image

invites the spectator to contemplation; before it the spectator can abandon himself to his associations. Before the movie frame he cannot do so. No sooner has his eye grasped a scene than it is already changed [...I. This constitutes the shock effect of the film (1 64f.)

- a shock effect against which the spectator has to defend himself by de- veloping a “heightened presence of mind” (1 65).

The differences between auratic and non-auratic experiences, are finally summed up as an opposition between “concentration” and “distraction.” Benjamin’s original German terms “Sammlung” and “Zerstreuung,” meaning “gathering” and “scattering,” suggest the underlying subject conception:

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The one who concentrates before a work of art immerses himself in it; he enters into this work of art the way the legend tells of the Chinese painter when he viewed his finished painting. In contrast, the distracted mass for their part immerse the work of art in them (166).

3. Semantics, History and Aesthetic Experience

We have come a long way since the first simple introduction of aura. We have met the wanderer at the hillside and the office worker locked up in his rented apartment, - the healing painter and the operating cameraman, - the concentrated art connoisseur and the distracted movie audience. What began as a discussion of how photography and film affect the position of traditional works of art has gradually developed into a discussion of typical modes of production and reception, a discussion of what we might call aesthetic registers.

Production and reception are described as identical processes in the auratic register: A “whole’’ subject - a painter, a spectator - is mimicking and identifying with a distant, whole object. The painter re-creates a living, organic totality; the spectator makes the work of art an organic part of himself or is absorbed by its organic totality.

While the spectator is free to follow his own melancholy associations when contemplating an auratic work of art, his freedom is suspended in the non- auratic register. Things are on the whole far more complicated here - because of the intervention of an apparatus between artist and reality as well as between spectator and spectacle. The cameraman penetrates reality with his dead, inhuman camera, and later on, in the cinema, the spectator is forced to follow the directives of the apparatus, to adopt its destructive, analysing attitude. But the apparatus seems to work in two directions: it also turns against the spectator, the film acts on him the way the camera originally acted on reality. He is penetrated, his subjectivity is broken, “zerstreut,” scattered, distracted - he has to defend himself.

We have followed a textual, rhetorical movement, read a few selected passages, discussed the ways in which Benjamin introduces and “defines” his key concepts. By focusing on his metaphorical “illustrations” and descriptions, we have in a way “destroyed” his text -but also, hopefully, made something “visible:” What we see now, more clearly, is the thematic structure that supports, if not generates, his complex argument about the aura and its destruction.

At the underlying thematic level there are, as we have seen, two basic types of subject/object-relations, described by clusters of semantic features derived from two series of oppositions: mimicry/destruction, similarity/difjfer-


ence, distance/closeness, passiveness/activeness. The fundamental variations of this structure may be summed up like this:

(i) Subject and object are related either by similarity (identity) or by difference (non-identity), coupled with distance or closeness (: the spectator looking at a distant humanized object versus the inhuman apparatus which is “too close to” the body of reality.)

(ii) Production and reception appear in two variations based on the opposition between similarity and difference: On the one hand there is mimicry - leading to the subject’s incorporation or penetration o f an identical object, on the other hand there is destruction, the subject’s violent penetration of a non- identical object.

As it appears, the thematic structure is relatively simple and quite straight- forward: the basic elements are distributed evenly, the semantic oppositions are neatly linked to each other, producing in the course of the text an overarching opposition between what we have called the auratic and the non-auratic register. There is, however, one small asymmetry in this otherwise fundamentally symmetrical structure - the activeness / passiveness-opposition does not match with the other ones:

In almost all cases - auratic as well as non-auratic - aesthetic production and reception are described as active processes (: the painter and his audience act on the object, the camera acts on reality, etc.), but at a certain point the active-passive categories are turned around at the semantic level. In one variation of auratic experience the spectator absorbs or incorporates the identical object. Film experience is apparently a similar process (: “the distracted mass for their part immerse the work of art in them”) but is nevertheless in most cases described in the passive mode: The subject is acted upon by the non-identical object. As said before, the cinematic apparatus works in two directions: reality is blown up by the film and so is the spectator. We shall discuss some consequences of this point of view in the final parts of the paper, but first a few words about the relationship between the thematic structure and Benjamin’s historical argument.

At the beginning of chapter 111, Benjamin writes:

Within larger periods of history, the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity’s entire mode of existence. The manner in which human sense perception is organized, the medium in which it is accomplished, is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as well.

(141)

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Seen from one point of view, the essay is one large unfolding of this argument, a detailed discussion of the relations between central modes of aesthetic experience, specific media and basic forms of social organization within “larger periods of history.”

Even the apparently “a-historical” aura of natural objects is part of this fundamentally historical argument: With its strong 19th century connotations, the image of the lonely, contemplative wanderer at the hillside pro- vides a necessary background for the following descriptions of modern urban life (: the Parisian streets of crime; the exploding metropolis). Here, as elsewhere in the essay, modernity is the crucial borderline. The oppositions between the auratic and the non-auratic register may be summarized in a static semantic structure as we have just done it, but they are meant to be dynamic, diachronous oppositions describing a historical development, a significant transition at the level of aesthetics caused by major social changes as well as by the introduction of new media.

The metaphorical descriptions of, primarily visual, aesthetic experiences that supports Benjamin’s historical argument are, on the other hand, not particularly historical in themselves. There is, after all, a very long tradition for describing the act of looking exactly the way he does - as imitation, incorporation, penetration and destruction: We know from ancient mythology, traditional folktales, centuries of literature - as well as from the stock phrases of modern everyday language - that people “devour” each other with the eyes; that some have “open” eyes while others have “evil, penetrating” eyes; that the eyes of Medusa’s snakes paralyse the spectator; that one glance at the Sphinx will destroy you; that charismatic figures with powerful eyes hypnotize people to mimic their movements etc., etc. In short: It is fairly easy to find descriptions parallel to those of Benjamin - outside the field of aesthetics proper and on both sides of his crucial historical watershed.

This does not necessarily spoil his historical argument: It is for instance quite conceivable that a particular mode of experience may have a predominant position within a given historical period, supported by a certain social structure, a social class, a mode of production, etc. And it is equally conceivable that a given mode of aesthetic experience may be articulated with particular force in relation to specific media. The point in introducing the counter-examples above is simply to suggest that the field may be more complex than Benjamin’s uni-linear historical argument seems to indicate, i.e. that other modes of experience may exist side by side with the predomi-


nant one, within one and the same historical period, and even within one and the same individual.

4. On the Couch

To develop this point further, let me introduce yet another Hilfskonstruktion, one which Benjamin himself used from time to time, namely Freudian psychoanalysis.

Psychoanalysts have often emphasized the striking parallelisms between visual experiences as described in mythology, etc. and the ways in which “the act of looking at the object” is represented in the Unconscious. Furthermore, psychoanalytical practice has demonstrated that such representations often play an active, determining role in the actual act of looking.

The very same year in which Benjamin published the Artwork essay, the German psychoanalyst Otto Fenichel devoted an article to these issues. In “Schautrieb und Identifizierung” he wrote:

The act of looking at an object may carry various meanings in the Unconscious, among which we pay particular attention to the following: to eat the looked- at object; to become like it (to be forced to imitate it); or the other way round: to force it to become like oneself.’*

He then goes on to show that these representations are founded in one of the infantile component drives, the scopic drive. While the main function of this drive is to produce forepleasure, the subject’s identification with the desired, looked-at object is also an important aspect, a phenomenon which is particularly evident in perversions like voyeurism and exhibiti0ni~m.l~

However, in the early, formative stages of a subject’s life the scopic drive is primarily a forerunner of the drivefor knowledge: The child is looking - in order to learn something, to master the world, to solve its mysteries. And in this form, as mastering or taking possession of the object, the act of looking is often connected with sadistic impulses: The subject looks at the object in order to subjugate and destroy it - or, as Fenichel puts it:

In the direction of the scopic drive there is always or very often a tendency to harm the looked-at object and a tendency to identify with and take part in it (151).

Identification and destruction merge because the scopic drive, like all infantile, pre-genital component drives, is based on a primitive, archaic subject/object-

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relationship. The basic figure of this relationship is incorporation - which, according to Freud, is the very precondition of all later forms of identification. This point can be illustrated by summarizing Fenichel’s discussion of the libidinous gaze:

The libidinous gaze takes the form of an intense staring; it is first and foremost a motor activity, an exploration:

the world does not come to the eye, on the contrary one goes straight at the world with the eye, as if one wanted to “eat” it (153).

There is, in principle, no great difference between this gaze and the “normal,” adult way of looking. Motor activity is a characteristic feature in any act of looking but is on the other hand most pronounced in the early stages of the subject’s life, in what Fenichel calls the archaic gaze:

There is a primitive form of looking resp. of visual imagination. This original gaze cannot be separated from motor function; perception and imagination are not yet clearly separated; one sees oneself actively into the looked-at object [...I during the act of looking one’s own body is changed; at first the looked-at- object is - like originally all perceived objects - not sharply separated from one’s own body; to perceive and to respond motorically to the perceived is still one and the same thing (1 53).

This gaze is, like all primitive, archaic types of perception, a taking-part, an activity - which in later stages of the individual’s life is split up into the independent processes of perception, thought and motor action.

The psychoanalytical interpretation of the gaze may be summed up like this: The scopic drive is the basis of all visual experiences. In the normal adult person i t merely “frames” the experience - except in those cases where the subject for some reason or another regresses to earlier forms of perception. Fenichel uses the lover’s libidinous gaze as his main example of an experience which is actively determined by (one variation of) the scopic drive, but the voyeuristic and fetishistic gazes could be mentioned in the same c~nnection.’~ In these cases the archaic components of the scopic drive are foregrounded, and the act of looking is experienced either as identification with (incorporation of) the object or as destruction of the object.

Now let us return to Benjamin -who actually touches on regression several times during the Artwork essay: The dreaming wanderer on the hillside, the spectator brooding over the aesthetic object, the film audience in the dark dream palaces of Modernity - most of his examples focus on situations in which the subject’s relation to reality is if not totally suspended then certainly

Benjamin at the Movies 127 ~~ ~~~~

“loosened up,” i.e. situations in which the possibilities for regression to archaic modes of experience are optimal.

If we proceed along this line of thought it is hard to ignore the similarities between the auratic mode of experience and Fenichel’s description of the active, libidinous gaze: In both cases a subject is “going at” the world with an active, mobile eye, penetrating the object or devouring it. Furthermore, the very act of looking is, in both cases, based on - or producing - identification, identity between subject and object.

There are also some quite evident correspondences between the non-auratic mode of experience and the destructive, sadistic variation of Fenichel’s archaic gaze, but in this case things are a bit more complicated: According to Fenichel, the object is destroyed by the subject’s sadistic gaze, while the object in Benjamin’s version destroys the subject. One might of course argue that even Benjamin’s spectator identifies with and incorporates the cinematic object. The point is, however, that the situation is not experienced (not described) as a merging of subject and object but precisely as the annihilation of the subject by an alien, external force.

Benjamin does have a few examples of a subject’s active, phallo-sadistic destruction of the object - think for instance of the cameraman who penetrates reality with his insensitive apparatus. But at the point where a psychoanalyti- cally inclined reader would expect a similar description of an active spectator, the cinematic object turns up once again - now transformed into an active, destructive counter-subject. “Hier fehlt etwas” - as psychoanalysts are wont to say: Something - the active, phallo-sadistic spectator - is missing in Benjamin’s text. Or to put it another way: Because of the small active/passive asymmetry we mentioned above, Benjamin’s text does not totally match Fenichel’s.

And so what? The Artwork essay is obviously not written in order to provide examples for a psychoanalytical textbook. Hence, the missing element is only a problem if one insists on forcing the text against a psychoanalytical grid like Fenichel’s. There is - indeed - a striking general correspondence between Fenichel’s theorization of visual experience and Benjamin’s way of describing such experiences, but Fenichel’s article is, after all, precisely a theorization, a general overview summarizing a wide range of actual as well as possible modes of experience, while Benjamin for his part is presenting a selection of concrete examples with the intention of illustrating a significant historical transition within one specific field: that of aesthetic experience.

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The simple, evident reason why the active, destructive spectator is missing in Benjamin’s text is, we might argue, that he writes about historical reality - in which this type of spectator doesn’t exist, or at least doesn’t exist in the context of the new visual media where the passive counterpart, the alarmed, overwhelmed spectator is the central figure. So, there is really nothing missing here, no “blind spot” in the text.

But it is not as simple as that - for it is actually quite difficult to determine what kind of historical reality the text refers to.

5. Active and Passive Spectators Let us for a moment leave the 1930s and take a quick look at how modern film theory handles some of the issues raised by the Artwork essay.

In one part of the field, Benjamin’s passive, fragmented and distracted spectator has vanished completely. The most obvious example here are the influential writings of David Bordwell15 who, working in the tradition of cognitive psychology, argues that film experience is a dynamic process in which the structure of the film-object interacts with the totality of the spectator-subject’s former knowledge and experiences; the film “works on” the spectator and the spectator “works on” the film in a process of mutual “cuing. ”

In the other main part of the field, the cognitive aspects of film experience are usually ignored or are at least not considered a major issue: Writers who take their point of departure in psychoanalytical theory are first and foremost concerned with the spectator’s unconscious reactions, with typical forms of pleasure derived from watching a film - and the spectator-figure of these writers is, ironically enough, much closer to Benjamin’s than to that of Bordwell. Christian Met2 seminal study of the unconscious relations between the imaginary cinematic signifier and the spectator’s imaginary as well as his discussion of the similarities between film and dream may serve as examples of this.16 But although Metz, here as elsewhere, stresses the passivity of the viewing situation, his argument is - like those of most other psychoanalyti- cally inspired film theorists - nevertheless based on the assumption that film experience, even in its unconscious aspects, presupposes a high degree of mental activity on the part of the spectator.

Benjamin’s passive spectator is apparently in some sort of crisis nowadays - as is his threatening, fragmented cinematic object: Contemporary film theorists - cognitivists and psychoanalysts alike - have repeatedly emphasized


that although all films actually consist of fragments, the individual shots are usually organized in such a way that the gaps between them are sutured, made “invisible”. Instead of falling apart in disparate elements, films present themselves as convincing illusions of reality, of organic wh01eness.l~

There are some obvious historical reasons for these differences between Benjamin’s text and recent film theory: What nowadays is known as The Film, i.e. the classical “Hollywood”-pattern, was only one possibility among many when Benjamin wrote his essay. And although the forms of narrative organization which characterize this specific type of aesthetic object were indeed predominant at the level of film production even in Benjamin’s time, they were not fully established as mental schemata, as structures of reception in the spectator-subject. In other words: Modern theory presupposes a kind of cinematic object and a kind offiZm audience neither of which were totally institutionalized when Benjamin wrote his essay.

This is the first point to be made about the historicity of Benjamin’s text - and one that seems to support (at least one part of) his argument: The reason why he insists on the spectator’s passivity is - we might argue - that the experience of being overpowered, dominated by an alien, insensitive, impatient object, etc., was indeed a real experience, well known to the generations who, unfamiliar with the new medium, entered the cinemas in the early decades of the century. Later on, however, things changed, and Benjam- in’s passive spectator turned out to be a transitional figure: The many co- existing types of film coagulated and became The Film; the cinema audience learned to master, more or less unconsciously, the rules of the “new law;” other more active modes of experience became possible.

It may here be necessary to emphasize that Benjamin is not interested in the early film audience’s possible confusion or fear of the destructive object. Contrary to what might be expected, he describes, over and over’again, the subject’s distraction and fragmentation as a valuable, uplifting experience - as opposed to the concentration and identification usually associated with the experience of traditional works of art.

He was not the only one who thought so - and this is the second historical point: Many radical intellectuals - for instance a film critic like Siegfried Kracauer, or filmmakers and film theorists like Sergei Eisenstein and Bela Balasz - felt, like Benjamin, that there was a redemptive, liberating quality in experiences like these, a promise of a totally new kind of aesthetics which would destroy the traditional Institution Kunst.

130 Peter Larsen

However, Eisenstein and the other filmmakers stressed a slightly different aspect of the inevitable clash between the new visual media and their unpre- pared audience. They discussed it from a “constructivist” perspective, a perspective which in many way corresponds to that of a modem cognitivist like David Bordwell: They knew from practical experience that although the spectator may be distracted and confused by the new strange aesthetic object, his mind always works on the assumption that the flow of images on the screen is not accidental but intentional: someone has organized them precisely like this in order to communicate something - and, consequently, the spectator always tries to make sense of what he is watching, he always tries to construct a meaningful totality.

The early filmmakers were also “constructivists” in another sense: They studied the workings of the spectator’s mind precisely because they wanted to control his construction of sense in practice. They wanted to develop a new kind of sober-minded, radical aesthetics based on the spectator’s constructive abilities, an aesthetics which in time would make the traditional, wet senti- mentality for - and identification with - works of art obsolete.

6. Enjoyment and Criticism There are in fact parts of the Artwork essay in which Benjamin indirectly suggests an interpretation of the spectator parallel to that of his constructivist con temporaries.

Take for instance the short chapter on photography. By referring to Atget’s photographs as “clues,” etc., Benjamin implicitly suggests that they could be examined precisely the way in which a police officer or a classical detective examines a scene of crime. However, the active, inquiring subject is only hinted at in passing at this point and is quickly replaced by the alarmed spectator who needs guidance on his way through the pages of the illustrated magazine, and who later on readily submits himself to the directives of the film.

The active subject re-appears when Benjamin writes about the spectator who is forced to identify with the active analysing camera. Here he is more explicit - arguing that the spectator has to look at the film the way the camera looks at the world, i.e. with a testing, analysing gaze. But once again the text quickly moves on, in a completely different direction.

Here is a third historical point - a tricky one that must be phrased as


questions: The active spectator was obviously there, in historical reality as well as in the theoretical writings of Benjamin’s contemporaries, so why is this figure not central to Benjamin’s argument? Why do the examples mentioned above dissolve into images of powerlessness? Why does Benjamin - an avid admirer of Brecht and Eisenstein - not stick to the constructivist perspective?

A psychoanalyst would presumably answer these questions by pointing to Benjamin’s own subjective history. The Artwork essay is after all not the only work of his that shows an remarkably positive attitude toward destruction or contains fantasies of being penetrated and fragmented by an inhuman, demanding authority - all of which might indicate an underlying personal character structure disposed for masochistic modes of experience. But this is of course not an answer, only guesswork. Many details in Benjamin’s early biography are still unknown (and will probably remain so forever) - and long-distance psychoanalysis of this kind is, at any rate, always a suspicious and risky business.

We may never know the reason why Benjamin insisted so strongly on the passive, masochistic aspects of film experience. And perhaps it is not so important since his “blind spot” didn’t totally spoil his vision - or the vision of his text. In the examples mentioned above (and a few similar ones) he is at least very close to describing a quite different mode of experience - based on an active scrutinizing, analytical gaze: What is said in these example is that on the one hand the film is just a sequence of shots, recordings of what the camera once saw, fragments pasted together by the editor - therefore the subject has to mimic the apparatus. But this is not all: he also has to test and analyse, to order and organize the individual fragments, in short: he must read the film, structure the object. Looked at with this kind of gaze, the shots and their montage are experienced precisely as clues, indices, as signs referring to signifying totalities beyond their immediate local context. Each part of the cinematic sequence presents itself to the spectator as a riddle he has to solve.

What is a t stake here is, as suggested above, cognitive processes like those studied by early constructivists and modern cognitivists - but also something more, precisely an attitude, as Benjamin himself puts it, a general framing of the object, different from the one he usually writes about when discussing film experience.

So, in a way the missing element was not missing after all, it was only

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hidden - for this testing, analysing attitude towards the object is precisely what characterizes the active “phallo-sadistic gaze,” a gaze which breaks into the visual object, focuses on its fragments, isolates and joins them - according to the “new law” of the film, but also according to the “ancient law” of the subject: the archaic drive for knowledge. All gazes rooted in the Unconscious produce pleasure. The pleasure of the analytical gaze (a pleasure which is rarely discussed in the writings of modern cognitivists) is that of conquering, of mastering, of solving the riddle of the Sphinx, of knowing the secrets of the world.’*

The passive, masochistic, distracted spectator is constantly being pushed to the centre of the textual stage in these last chapters of the Artwork essay. But out of the corner of the eye we can also see a shadowy figure standing in the wings: the active, destructive analytical spectator. He is there - and is not really there since his presence is only hinted at in fleeting suggestions and quickly dismissed examples. The text hides him - but knows him all the same. It even knows the special pleasure of his gaze - as we discover when we read the short enigmatic passage in chapter XI1 where Benjamin discusses the radical, political potential of the new media. He argues here that “the mechanical reproduction of the work of art changes the attitude of the masses toward art” (1 59). In the new, progressive attitude

the pleasure of looking [die Lust am Schauen] and experiencing combines directly and intimately with a professional evaluating attitude.

(Ibid.)

In the dark cinema the spectator watches an alien, incomprehensible, fragmented object. He is overwhelmed, assailed by the object - but defends himself by a heightened presence of mind, he examines the object, tries to solve its riddle. Or as Benjamin concludes: “In the cinema the critical and enjoying attitude of the audience merge” (ibid.).

Again: it is only a glimpse. But it is precisely in glimpses like this we sense the image of another kind of spectator, an image in which components of later psychoanalytical and cognitivist film theory seem to be anticipated and merged in a strangely unorthodox way. What is suggested here is that film experience could be understood as a two-fold process, as a fusion of masochistic submission and sadistic omnipotence, of passive immersion and active, operative analysis, as a merging of enjoyment and distanciated analytical criticism - and that the pleasure of film experience derives from both aspects of the process.


In the spectator’s original and necessary identification with the camera the screen is transformed, it is no longer a barrier but an opening - from which the flow of images in the form of pre-fabricated daydreams force their way into his eyes, but also an opening through which these very eyes, in an opposite movement, force their way into the image. The spectator’s construction of sense, of new alternative realities, depends on these two destructive movements.

Benjamin knew this very well. Among the material he collected for his unfinished Passagen- Werk there is a piece of paper in envelope N on which he has written: “‘The construction’ presupposes ‘the destruction’.’’

NOTES

1. Walter Benjamin: Briefe, G. Scholem and Th. Adorno (Eds.), Frankfurt am Main, 1966, pp. 764f.

2. Published in 1939, in vol. 8 of Sfudies in Philosophy and Social Science, the exile edition of Zeitschrifr fur Sozialforschung.

3. Bertolt Brecht: Arbeitsjournal. Erster Band, 1938 bis 1942 Werner Hecht (Ed.), Frankfurt am Main, 1973, p. 14.

4. Walter Benjamin: “L‘cevre d’art a I’epoque de sa reproduction micaniske,” in: Zeitschrift fur Soziafforschung, 5 , Heft 1, 1936. French translation by Pierre Klossowski.

5. There is a final ironic, tragic twist to the story: Only one of Benjamin’s texts, the “Pariser Brief,” was ever accepted by Das Wort; its publication in 1936 cost him his German citizenship. For more details of this and of his problems with the Artwork essay, see Werner Fuld‘s Benjamin biography: Walter Benjamin. Zwischen den Stiihlen (1 9791, paperback edition: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1981, p. 274ff.

6. See Rolf Tiedemann: Studien zur Philosophie Walter Benjamins, Frankfurt a. M. 1973, p. 112 and note 222.

I . Th.W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer: Dialektik der Aufilarung, Amsterdam 1947. 8. See, as an example, Peter Burger’s reading of the essay in his Theorie der Avant-

garde, Frankfurt am Main, 1974. 9. The English version of the essay in Walter Benjamin: Illuminations, New York

1968, is too free for my purposes. I have used it as a basis for the following quotations, but in order to obtain the most precise translation I have in each case tacitly corrected it against the German version in Walter Benjamin: Illuminationen, Frankfurt am Main, 1977. Page numbers after quotations therefore refer to the German version (which is a reprint of the revised text from the critical edition of Benjamin’s Gesammelte Schriften).

10. One example is Christian Metz who argues, from a psychoanalytical point of view, that identification with the apparatus is the “primary identification” from

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which all other forms of spectator identification are derived. Christian Metz: “The Imaginary Signifier” in his Psychoanalysis and Cinema, London 1982.

11. In the English version of the essay, Hi[fkonstruktion is translated as “helpful analogy” -which catches the function of the following examples, but not the actual meaning of the term. A more precise translation could be “auxiliary construction.”

12. Otto Fenichel: “Schautrieb und Identifizierung”, in: Internationale Zeitschrift f i r Psychoanalyse, 1935, p. 149. The English translation - “The Scoptophilic Instinct and Identification,” in: H. Fenichel and D. Rapaport (Eds.): The Collected Papers of Otto Fenichel, First Series, New York, 1953 - was not available at the time of writing, therefore this and the following quotations are my translations of the German original.

13. See Sigmund Freud: “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality”, [1905], in: Standard Edition, vo1.7.

14. See for instance Peter Larsen: “Across the Surface, Toward the Frame. On Dimen- sions of Visual Pleasure,” in The Nordicorn Review of Nordic Mass Communication Research, no. 1 ., 1990.

15. See David Bordwell: The Narration in the Fiction Film, London, 1985. 16. See Christian Metz: Psychoanalysis and Cinema (op.cit.). 17. In recent years the distracted spectator and the fragmented object have turned up

in another, related field: in discussions of contemporary television. See John Ellis: Visible Fictions, London, 1982, and Peter Larsen: “Beyond the Narrative. Rock Videos and Modem Visual Fictions,” in Michael Skovmand (Ed.): Media Fictions, Aarhus, 1989.

18. For a more detailed psychoanalytical interpretation of the analytical gaze, see Peter Larsen: Det Private Oje. Et Essay om Billeder og Blikke. (In Danish.) Copenhagen, 1991 - the main points of which are summarized in Peter Larsen: “Der private Blick,” in: Fotogeschichte. Beitrage zur Geschichte und Asthetik der Fotographie, Heft 40, 1991.

Peter Larsen. Born 1943. BA, 1970 (Film Studies); MA, 1972 (Scandinavian Literature and Languages); professor at Department for Mass Communication, University of Bergen, Norway. Recent publications include Tidens Tegn, Copenhagen 1989, and Det Private 0je. Et Essay om Billeder og Blikke. (In Danish.) Copenhagen 1991.

Benjamin at the Movies Aura, Gaze and History in the Artwork Essay

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