Benjamin XVI – The Unconscious World of Film

“The most important social function of film is to establish equilibrium between human beings and the apparatus”

After a series of installments in an essay dedicated to “Art in the age of its technological reproducibility,” Benjamin arrives in the 16th section to a point about a certain “equilibrium” between humans and the apparatus of film making.  What Benjamin ends up referring to here is the “insight into the necesseties governing our lives” that film can provide.  I found this to be a very interesting statement, especially with the specific examples that Benjamin uses – “…its use of close-ups, by its accentuation of hidden details in familiar objects, and by its exploration… through the ingenious guidance of the camera.”  Benjamin is drawing our attention to the very attention to detail that films provide us with.  It is a fact of viewership, and vitally important to theory arguments surrounding the falseness of the apparatus (and of course for Benjamin’s larger arguments about the falseness of the reproduction of art let alone a physical landscape).

If any one of us were standing in a room with one of our friends, our attention may be drawn to the little trinkets that he or she possesses, in an effort to better understand that person.  Say, for example, there is a special pen on his or her desk – it might draw our attention.  But our scope of those things is rather short as the moment is instantaneous, and presumably we are more focused on the person themselves.  In films, however, the close-up that Benjamin refers to serves to replicate an impossibly attentive version of this same situation.  Filming a scene in which we stand in a room with our friends can employ a greater range of perception than a real-life version of that instance ever could.  If there is a special pen on the desk, we might get a close up, HD image of that pen, providing us with a hyper-real interpretation of that person’s belongings (and implicitly their personality, style, etc).  “Clearly,” as Benjamin says, “it is another nature which speaks to the camera as compared to the eye.”  Benjamin refers to this as the “optical unconscious” – that is, things we consciously have no knowledge of as human beings in day to day life, but rather rely on the apparatus of a camera to reveal.  In this same light, Benjamin reinforces his point by noting that previous theory on the existence of two worlds by Heraclitus – the collective real world and the solitary dream world – is now “invalidated by film” due to this cinematic exposé on the unconscious elements of everyday life.

Bringing it all back to Benjamin’s first statement about the equilibrium between human beings and the apparatus, he validates the existence of this unconscious world by noting the “possibility of psychic immunization… by means of certain films in which the forced development of fantasies or masochistic delusions can present their natural and dangerous maturation in the masses.”  To paraphrase,film can take our multifaceted individual minds and tranquilize them using what they at first thought could only exist in a dream world, and now exists in a conjunctive “imagination land” on screen,provided by the ability of a film to depict the “unconscious.”

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