In this chapter Benjamin mainly relates film to the art movement of Dadaism and how it sought to make the masses react. He starts by stating that:

It has always been among art’s most important functions to generate a demand for whose full satisfaction the time has not yet come. (P30)

By this I think he means that the art form needs space to evolve and to grow into something substantial. He then uses the example of Dadaism and how one of the main elements of this art movement was to create shock by using the element of spectacle. By using this then it would create a reaction and it’s this process that Benjamin is interested in and relates it to film.

Dadaism and the use of shock value was mainly done through the way they defaced their work, such as sticking bus tickets onto paintings, but the most famous example would be Duchamp’s Urinal. By displaying this as a work of art, the sheer spectacle of it created outcry and derision and as Benjamin points out:

Dadaist demonstrations did indeed constitute a very violent diversion in that they placed the work of art at the centre of a scandal. That work had above all to meet one requirement: it must provoke public irritation (P31)

He then moves on to mention the unsubtle nature of Dadaism and how this could be seen as taking a sledgehammer to the senses. This is then compared with film, of how distracting film is and how the mass movement created by film is also used by Dadaism. Both of those are a similar phenomenon but I’m not sure how close they are and does strike me as being a bit weak, the transference of similar elements seems a bit tenuous.

However he then summarises that film can’t be viewed with the same contemplation as painting because it moves whereas a painting is static. But as the film is always moving, then it distracts the brain and stimulates the senses in a different way, engages the viewer differently and helps them to become immersed in the film.

It is this sense of immersion that Benjamin is driving at by comparing it with Dadaism. The sense of outrage, the shock value, overwhelms in the same way as film does, and so supports the notion of the mass movement mentioned in the previous chapter.