Page 14 - Cinematic Thinking Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema

4 James Phillips

of cinema has been presupposed. Is it not the case that even if one bears
in mind that the proper name of a director denotes a constellation of col-
laborators, rather than a lone individual given over to the expression of his
or her personal artistic vision, the specificity that Kracauer ascribes to cin-
ema on the basis of its engagement with the material dimension has been
exchanged for the understanding of the arts in general as the stamping of
material with an overarching message (the message of the collaborators)?
This question, however, is a little unfair. The cinematic proper name in-
variably escapes the interiority of an individual or a collective to invoke
the historical and perceptual thickness of a given place: it becomes a path
into that very concreteness of the cinematic image that remains unattain-
able for a general discussion of cinema.
In another sense, however, as Walter Benjamin contends in his essay
"The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility" (Das Kunst-
werk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit), cinema amounts
to a break with the concrete: the here and now of the work of art, as con-
stitutive of its "aura," yield to the nondeterminant locality and temporality
of the multiple copies of a film. Whatever pretensions Kracauer may put
forward in the name of the superior material engagement of cinema have
to be set against the dissolution of the material singularity of the cinematic
work itself. Reproductions of a work of the visual arts testify, as copies,
to the privileged here and now of the original, whereas the performances
of a theatrical text or a musical score, inasmuch as they first endow their
sources with the singularity of a here and now, are their realization more
than their reproduction. In cinema there is no such relation between origi-
nal and copy. Benjamin, who wishes to ascribe a revolutionary potential to
simulacra, writes off the here and now of the work of art as vestiges of the
cult object. But in this regard Benjamins Marxism remains too metaphysi-
cal. Political activism, which is by necessity a confrontation with, as well
as enactment of, the here and now, cannot be given its due in an account
that defines authenticity (aura) by the here and now and undertakes its
liquidation.
The political hopes that Benjamin was not alone in placing in the
"democratic" medium of cinema appear ill-founded so far as the disavow-
al of the here and now of the public at a given screening is concerned. By
virtue of the possibility/threat/prohibition of participation, the one-off
aesthetic space of a theatrical performance is much closer in nature to the
volatile political space of a party meeting or mass rally than the lightless,