Yeah, Walter Benjamin......he was the shit.

"Their most powerful agent is the film. Its social significance, particularly in its most positive form, is inconceiveable without its destructive, cathartic aspect, that is, the liquidation of the traditional value of the cultural heritage."

He uses the word "liquidation." That word is very important in Marxist theory, signifying the destruction of so-called production costs in order to further the cause of consumption. In this model of society, culture is a product for consumption; the cost-benefit analysis of film is that it produces a greater effect; i.e. it embraces more "culture" in less time and is more easily distributed and reproduced than other art forms, therefore making it more viable, more desirable and ultimately more culturally significant than such things as painting. Our need to absorb abstract reproductions of life has thus been made its own component of the marketplace; the desire for art is another fashionable good for consumption.

 This is not a unique turn of events in that it symbolized an increasing synthesis of art with reality and of movement of reality toward reproducibility; many breakthroughs have been made over history that have initiated similar revolutions. The uniqueness of film was how fast it changed us, and how primitively we are still dealing with the existential reverberations of that change.

The part of this essay I am not so sure of is that dealing with the switch in emphasis from the role of religion, "the cult," to a sort of free association of existential discourse. How can a change in medium change the entire metaphysics of a society? Comparing film with hieroglyphs, Abel Gance said that this new art form is accompanied by "insufficient respect for, insufficient cult of, what it expresses." In other words, our religion should follow our means of expression. Everything we believe or feel is substantiated by God is secondary to what we see and how art transmutes reality. I'm not sure I'm ready to believe this. It implies a lot of things; it implies that cave mythology was more an act of painting on cave walls than it was a pantheon of gods.

Somewhere I read once that books talk to each other. Rather than addressing people, books are only refrencing other books. That's why they're able to construct a mythology entirely their own. 

Um... I don't know what to ask. What was the last movie Benjamin had seen before writing this essay? How had it influenced his reflections on the purpose of film?

Who was his favorite actress?