(Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) Rolf J

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LUTZ KOEPNICK
to conceptualize figurations of physicality in contemporary screen culture
and how these may communicate with a viewer’s desire to project
himself bodily or empathetically — at the level of the tactile and the
affective — into the action on screen?
In his artwork essay Benjamin famously maps his distinction of the
auratic and post-auratic onto the difference between acting on a theater
stage and acting in front of a camera. Theatrical performances cannot do
without a certain rhetoric of the here and now; they take place in front
of a present public and in each and every instant adjust to the physical
presence of audience members. Acting for the theater rests on principles
of temporal continuity and spatial contiguity; it invites the audience to
identify and empathize, not simply with a certain character of a play, but
with how the actor achieves unique and unrepeatable visibility during
the very act of performance. Acting for the camera, by contrast, destroys
this kind of aura. It causes the theater stage’s rhetoric of authenticity and
uniqueness to vanish as the filming process replaces a living audience
with the cold gaze of a mechanical recording device. Cinema, Benjamin
insists, for the first time in history allows ordinary audience members to
appear as objects of cultural representation. Unlike the theater, it does
not require specials skills in order to be filmed for a newsreel show, situating
cinema — in Benjamin’s eyes — as a principally democratic and
anti-hierarchic tool of cultural exchange. Just as importantly, however,
even when relying on professional actors, cinema fundamentally changes
the way in which audience members look at and project themselves into
what is being enacted on screen. What stage actors must present as one
continuous temporal event, in a film studio can be the product of a multiplicity
of discontinuous and discontiguous shots and montage effects.
Whereas in theater the audience member basically has to look at the
physical movements of the actors from a fixed and monocular viewpoint,
in the film studio an actor’s movements are framed and reframed by the
movements of the camera, its ongoing repositioning, its use of special
effects, and hence its dismantling of the legacy of central perspective
and the early modern privileging of at once disembodied and distanced
sight. Benjamin summarizes:
Die Apparatur, die die Leistung des Filmdarstellers vor das Publikum
bringt, ist nicht gehalten, diese Leistung als Totalität zu respektieren.
Sie nimmt unter Führung des Kameramannes laufend zu dieser
Leistung Stellung. Die Folge von Stellungnahmen, die der Cutter
aus dem ihm abgelieferten Material komponiert, bildet den fertig
montierten Film. Er umfaßt eine gewisse Anzahl von Bewegungsmomenten,
die als solche der Kamera erkannt werden müssen — von
Spezialeinstellungen wie Großaufnahmen zu schweigen. So wird die
Leistung des Darstellers einer Reihe von optischen Tests unterworfen.
(GS I.2:488)