"Rashomon" and "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"

Benjamin’s piece, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” made me start thinking about film as art. Before I read this, I thought of film and movies as entertainment, but not necessarily as art. As Benjamin alludes to, film has lost some of its “aura” and therefore artistic value with all the reproduction that it goes through and the depersonalization through the camera. I was thinking about this while I watched “Rashomon.” The fact that it was in Japanese and not English had some positives and negatives. The subtitles were a bit distracting, but there weren’t very many of them. Since there wasn’t a lot of talking in the movie, I found myself watching the characters and the scenery more closely. This did make the film seem more artistic and like a silent movie. I think that if this movie was redone in color and in English, I wouldn’t find it as artistically appealing. Maybe older films are more ‘artistic’ because they don’t record exactly the same thing that someone could see by just watching the scene as modern films seem to do.