In this chapter Benjamin mainly talks about the actor and explores the difference between acting to an audience and to acting to the camera.

In one of the previous chapters he was talking about the actor giving a performance and that performance is an art form. Now he moves on to suggest that the performance for the audience is different than the performance given to a camera because it is continuous and so envelopes the actor more. With performing for the camera it can be stop and go from scene to scene and scenes can be reshot to make sure they are perfect, and this effects the aura of the actor.

From here he then suggests that the aura of the actor is lost when performing for the camera because of the loss of the present. He says:

A person is placed in the position, while operating with his whole being, of having to dispense with the aura that goes with it. For that aura is bound to the here and now, it has no replica. (P19)

So with the loss of this aura, this presence, the actor then assumes a different aura, the one of the character. This does make a certain amount of sense, I can understand that a live performance has the presence which the film does not, and I can also understand how the presence of the character fills the void left by the aura. For example, when I think of the film Scarface, Al Pacino gives a magnificent performance but it is the screen presence of his character, Tony Montana, which is truly memorable. Whereas recently Benedict Cumberbach has been winning praise for his portrayal of Hamlet of where Cumberbach’s stage presence carries the performance.

But the really interesting element of this chapter is at the end, where he asserts:

Nothing shows more graphically that art has escaped from the realm of the ‘beautiful pretence’, which for so long was deemed the only habitat in which it might thrive.

Reading between the lines, Benjamin is suggesting that the nature of art has changed because of the loss of the aura, which happened because of mechanical reproduction. This, to me, is a really big thing because it means that the huge paradigm of art, the way we think of art, has changed because of mechanical reproduction. This then leads to the next point being that the instrument of mechanical reproduction is the camera. So, the camera has changed the way that we see art, consume art, relate to art and understand art, but in itself is not always seen as art.