The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction Questions

Do you agree with how Walter Benjamin describes the feeling of actors before the camera, that they put their whole self into the film and therefore bear it all to the public? Is this a plausible or acceptable reason for many celebrities’ “interesting” behavior in public? What about celebrities who do not seem to have “false personalities” in public, do they not give their everything in front of the camera?

Do you believe that the surgeon and the magician (and therefore the painter and cameraman) are as opposite as the text makes them seem? The text says surgeons and magicians are “polar opposites” yet that depends on how you look at the situation, yes they do it in different ways, but they are both still trying to heal someone, each using the ways that they know best. Both have the chance of failure as well. If we look again at the example of the painter and the cameraman, we see that the painter is distanced from reality while the cameraman is right inside reality; the painter produces a total picture while the cameraman put fragments together in a new way. According to the text, these reasons point to a “representation of reality by the film” that is more real than that of the painter. Do you believe that painters and cameramen are polar opposites? Why or why not? Do your reasons support the idea that film is a better representation of reality?