Did mass production take away the aura of art? This is the question discussed by Walter Benjamin in the first chapter of The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Things on Media. He describes that the age of mass reproduction even had influence in art, changing the nature of the art from ritual to political, from secretive to public. After the reading, I, on the other hand, wanted to discuss about how we can give back the aura of art taken away by the technological reproduction, in the age where the original no more exists.
I’d like to refer to the first reading of Leaving the Movie Theater by Roland Barthes. Cinema has grown with the modern history of technological advancements; its nature itself is reproducible, fundamentally produced by a machine called camera. However, the aura of movies that was taken away (though arguably, the only moment it had the true aura according to Benjamin was the short age of kinetoscope, where the art was only meant for one audience at a time and in a dark room) were returned—or reconstructed—by the architecture of theater. The dark interior, wide screen and massive sound that cannot be replicated by the home theater provide the exclusive chance for the audience to be immersed and appreciate movies like they were able to in traditional museums. To rescue movies even further from sacrilegious nature of mass reproduction, people search for movie premiers, film festivals and exclusive releases to generate the uniqueness and excitement of watching something secretive. Cinema, in that sense, is the art of both rituals and politics. And I dare say, such amphibolic nature is what makes cinema such a great art.
Park Junseo, 3035859929