Pearl Harbor and Walter Benjamin

In “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin compares two forms of art: that of the painter and that of the cameraman. They both hold great ability, but they both don’t have the same powers. The painter and the cameraman have different ways of using reality, as Benjamin observed, “The painter maintains in his work a natural distance from reality, the cameraman penetrates deeply into its web” (section XI). This statement is very true. The following clip from Pearl Harbor (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sv1niwxQgoY) is a perfect example of how the cameraman penetrates deeply into the web of reality. The cameraman shows us a reality different from our own lives, but one that feels so real that we care about the outcome of the action. Benjamin also observed that the equipment that are used to make the movie seem to disappear and create, “an aspect of reality which is free of all equipment” (Section XII). The filmmakers of Pearl Harbor used a lot of mechanical equipment to produce Pearl Harbor, but the part the viewer sees is only what the camera saw. All of the extra machinery that went into making the movie disappears as the viewer is sucked into the action of the attack. It is unlike any other experience. The viewer gets to feel like they are attached to the back of a missile, then watch the aftermath of its explosion. The cameraman has the power to bring us wherever he wants us to be. We feel mayhem and confusion. The camera shakes in response to bombs going off and glides through the air with the airplanes. The camera takes us to places we never thought we would go.
Painters don’t have the same power that cameramen do. Benjamin commented, “Painting simply is in no position to present an object for simultaneous collective experience” (Section XII). Although Scream by Edvard Munch (http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/harris/munch.scream.jpg) is an enormously famous painting and you can feel through the brush strokes what the message of the painting is, it is not the same experience you get with movies. The painting is only one brief moment. You have to figure out what is happening or what has already happened in the story it is trying to tell. On the other hand, movies can bring you right into it. They make you feel as though you were there yourself not as if you are watching from a dark room. Movies feel like a ‘collective experience,” the story grows and gets more complicated, paintings, however, do not hold that power.