In Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, the part about the “Aura” really stood out to me. Benjamin explains the Aura as the unique feeling you get from something authentic, like an original piece of art or a special place. He describes it as a mix of closeness and distance, it’s something you can’t really recreate or duplicate. But then he talks about how film changes all that, and I found this part both fascinating and a little unsettling.
One part that stuck with me was: “With the close-up, space expands; with slow motion, movement is extended… it reveals entirely new structural formations of the subject.” To me, this is where Benjamin shows how film breaks apart the Aura. By zooming in or slowing things down, film makes us see stuff we’d never notice otherwise—like the texture of an object or the weirdly smooth way someone moves in slow motion. That’s cool because it gives us new ways of seeing the world, but it also takes away the specialness of experiencing something naturally. I also had the experience to go into a darkroom and develop a film myself, the process of screening a picture on to the paper in the dark is really magical. You have to test out which strength of light works best with the film you took and it really takes a lot of patient. Instead of this, we rarely use film anymore, taking pictures on our phone is just so much more easier and quicker.
This idea makes me think about how we experience art and media today. We’re surrounded by photos, videos, and TikToks that recreate moments over and over. Does that mean the Aura is gone? Or has it changed into something else? I’m not sure, but I do feel like Benjamin’s point about film “revealing” new things is true. We can see beauty or details in ordinary stuff that we’d miss otherwise. I still wonder if seeing it through a screen take away the magic? For me, this part of the reading got me thinking a lot about how we connect with art and the world around us now.