Analysis of Walter Benjamin's "Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"

    Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" discusses the ability to replicate different mediums of art, and how those mediums have been adapted for modern times. The essay mostly focuses on the mediums of film and photography, though he does acknowledge that art has always been reproducible. In the first section after the preface, he cites printmaking as an important step towards replicable artworks as it is one of the earliest ways that was found that enabled easily replicated pieces. Printmaking eventually led to lithography, which was surpassed by photography, being joined by film soon afterwards.

    It is important to note that Benjamin uses these points as a way to contrast communism and fascism. While it is alluded to in the prologue, in the epilogue of the book he states that fascism renders warfare and destruction as aesthetic, while communism politicizes art in response to that aesthetic. Additionally, Benjamin refers to early motivation for art as cult, referring to the ritual significance of religion and ritual in the motivation for creating art. This is largely as a way to establish how photography and film are more divorced from those concepts, as they are not traditionally as difficult to replicate and can depict just about anything with relatively little cost required for their creation.

     The first five chapters continue to follow the progression of art's ever-increasing reproducibility, eventually leading up to his assertion that film and photography are fundamentally inseparable from the idea that they can be reproduced. This is explored both practically, with the idea that film is different to other art forms in that it's whole production is formed by the assumption that it must be reproducible for mass consumption; and more formally in regards to how the artist presents both themselves and the work. This not only concerns the decisions of the film's directors, but the actors within the film and how they present themselves to the camera. The audience is another important factor in this, as they take the place of the camera in the performance of film. Benjamin describes their role as distinct from that of a theatrical play in his eleventh chapter, "In the theatre one is well aware of the place from which the play cannot immediately be detected as illusionary. There is no such place for the movie scene that is being shot."

    While Benjamin's book was written in 1998, later updated in 2005, it still provides perspective on the mediums of film and photography. The ease of reproduction in both of these mediums may make them appear as if they hold less value somehow, yet it allows for them to reach wider audiences as well as posing different questions for the artist to address when creating them. The art forms are easily politicized, as they are cheap to produce; this creates a fairly simple method of creating art to push an agenda, as well as putting the tools for making art in the hands of the people to both create things with artistic value and to record the world around them, potentially giving more people the opportunity to disrupt oppressive forces that would otherwise prevent them from expressing themselves.