Blog 3

Two Quotes from The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction:

“...for the first time – and this is the effect of the film – man has to operate with his whole living person, yet forgoing its aura. For aura is tied to his presence; there can be no replica of it. The aura which, on the stage, emanates from Macbeth, cannot be separated for the spectators from that of the actor. However, the singularity of the shot in the studio is that the camera is substituted for the public. Consequently, the aura that envelops the actor vanishes, and with it the aura of the figure he portrays.”

“Magician and surgeon compare to painter and cameraman. The painter maintains in his work a natural distance from reality, the cameraman penetrates deeply into its web. There is a tremendous difference between the pictures they obtain. That of the painter is a total one, that of the cameraman consists of multiple fragments which are assembled under a new law. Thus, for contemporary man the representation of reality by the film is incomparably more significant than that of the painter, since it offers, precisely because of the thoroughgoing permeation of reality with mechanical equipment, an aspect of reality which is free of all equipment. And that is what one is entitled to ask from a work of art.”

How do these quotes apply to The Blair Witch Project? Is the film an attempt at recapturing the aura (either of the actor of the landscape), or an even more assertive attempt at cutting into reality?

The first quote suggests that the actors in Blair Witch present to the audience an aura not of the actors themselves but rather, of the characters they portray. However, one of the goals of Blair Witch was to create a sense among the audience that they were not watching actors but rather, watching real people. Therefore, the auras of the three main characters serve to ground the viewer in the present reality of the situation rather than preoccupy them with the traits, motivations, etc. that might propel these characters forward in the narrative of some other film. In Blair Witch, however, it is the aura of the landscape rather than of the individual characters that is most dutifully recaptured for the viewer.

The second quote speaks to prominence of the filmed landscape in Blair Witch. Practically the entire film takes place in the wooods, and it is a goal of the filmmakers to create a genuinely scary yet realistic setting in which the characters can act out the story. This goal is acheived largely through the use of handheld digital video in Blair Witch which gives the scenes in the Woods an added sense of realism for two reasons; 1) The quality of the video itself is more realistic and less "pretty" than film, giving the surroundings a sense of natural rawness and grittiness. 2) The fact that all of the shots in Blair Witch are supposed to originate from a piece of diegetic equipment within the narrative heightens the illusion that we are seeing "an aspect of reality which is free of all equipment" In other words, the very images that are viewed on the screen would not exist (in the viewer's mind) were it not for the diegetic equipment used by the characters themselves. This distances the viewer from the actual equipment that was used to create the film and creates a heightened sense of reality and of "being there" with the characters.