“...for the first time – and this is the effect of the film – man has to operate with his whole living person, yet forgoing its aura. For aura is tied to his presence; there can be no replica of it. The aura which, on the stage, emanates from Macbeth, cannot be separated for the spectators from that of the actor. However, the singularity of the shot in the studio is that the camera is substituted for the public. Consequently, the aura that envelops the actor vanishes, and with it the aura of the figure he portrays.”
“Magician and surgeon compare to painter and cameraman. The painter maintains in his work a natural distance from reality, the cameraman penetrates deeply into its web. There is a tremendous difference between the pictures they obtain. That of the painter is a total one, that of the cameraman consists of multiple fragments which are assembled under a new law. Thus, for contemporary man the representation of reality by the film is incomparably more significant than that of the painter, since it offers, precisely because of the thoroughgoing permeation of reality with mechanical equipment, an aspect of reality which is free of all equipment. And that is what one is entitled to ask from a work of art.”
Now there is an obvious question which these quotes do not fully address, namely: how does this all relate to The Blair Witch Project? Patience, gentle reader. All shall be revealed.
These two quotes, pulled from the same essay, seem to be intended not to contradict one another. However, while the second quote seems almost as if it was written with TBP in mind, the first did not account the effect such films would have on their impressionable audience.
Benjamin correlated the sense of aura with the feeling of distance the artwork had from its audience. That can be described in a number of ways, the unrepeatable nature of a performance, the sense of history, etc. I like to describe aura as the sense that something is unique. This can take many forms. For example, a film nerd like myself would likely get slightly giddy looking at the original say, Seven Samurai film stock. Even though we can reproduce that film stock with no loss in quality, it would still feel special to see the original.
TBP is a fascinating piece of film in that it tries to cultivate that fuzzy "original-film-stock-feeling" by telling us that it is made entirely out of found footage. In that way (even if, like me, you knew from the start that it was all actors) it shakes up the lingering knowledge we all have in the back of our minds when watching a movie that this is in fact not real. Its a performance. Blair Witch comes right out and informs us that it IS real. Suddenly the cheap, mass produced DVD we are watching becomes a precious, completely unique archive of the last, terrifying moments of someone's life.
What is ironic is that this effect, the artificial cultivation of aura in a mass produced piece, is achieved not as Benjamin said by creating a distance from reality, but by thrusting us deeper into reality than ever before.
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