Benjamin Analyzing Benjamin

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASVeN-58HKk
From Times :30 to :45 sec
http://www.earthinpictures.com/world/usa/new_york/statue_of_liberty.html

A wise man once said, “Magician and surgeon compare to painter and cameraman”. Of course Walter Benjamin would be the person to make such a statement. My first thought upon reading this was how could anyone say a magician and a surgeon are like a painter and a cameraman?? ? However, after analyzing what Walter Benjamin has to say in his essay, it makes complete sense! He is just simply saying a cameraman can make images human like, where as a painter, or any type of traditional artist, keeps his distance from reality. The links I have provided above are evidence of how a traditional artist and a cameraman can create different, but very effective mediums when it comes to viewing art work.

Up above, I linked a picture of an “artistic image” the Statue of Liberty and the Angles and Demons movie trailer. Once you look at the Statue of Liberty, you are amazed by the size and design of such an object standing perfectly still every day. But, once you watch the movie trailer your mouth drops at the visuals of the statue and how it makes the Statue of Liberty look insignificant. Do you see how glossy the statue is? How God-like it looks, or even how digital and “cool” it seems? These qualities will almost never be found in traditional art such as the Statue of Liberty. The lighting, the close-up, and the special effects, which are all ‘mechanical equipment’, show “the representation of reality by film is incomparably more significant than that of the painter”. This statement alone from Walter Benjamin shows you how effective films truly are as a different medium. Not only to mention the glamour of the statue, but did you see how the statue basically transformed by time the cameraman got to the other side of it? It completely changed forms, which the Statue of Liberty could never do in an instance like how this film did. These new effects have allowed films to step into the realm of reality and dive deep into its core, which painters would never do.

As you can see, once you begin to compare a traditional sculpture to an animated sculpture, it is just unfair. A film can manipulate the sculpture any way it wants to portray a message in an array of ways. As Walter Benjamin has said, “The reactionary attitude toward a Picasso painting changes into the progressive reaction toward a Chaplin Movie”, which means that films have just become more entertaining than a piece of traditional art work due to the mechanical equipment available. After comparing the two, there is no way anyone should not be able to see how close cameramen come to touching reality and how far away artist seem to be from reality.