Peter Feng replies: > I'm afraid I don't really understand the question. While Wenders has said > that his work is Benjaminian, and I think WINGS OF DESIRE is Benjaminian in > some ways, there are other aspects of Benjamin's writings that are more > relevant than the concept of "aura." In particular, Benjamin's "Theses on > the Philosophy of History," which not incidentally turn on an image of > angels, strike me as more relevant. I was wondering about this too, since Benjamin clearly indicates that he finds film as *destroying* aura by "[detaching] the reproduced object from the domain of tradition." It is this that, according to Benjamin, removes art from its religious functions in ritual and moves it to politics. All of this, of course, is not at all a Bad Thing, for Benjamin at least. Movie studios do try to compensate for the loss of aura by creating the "false aura" of the cult of the movie star, but this is a bad move, in Benjamin's view. Of course, "The Work of the Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" was written at a time when the possibilities of film as a medium were still a subject of debate. His conclusions stand, strangley, somewhere between Dziga Vertov and Bazin in his attention to film's ability to copy the "real." And Benjamin was writing before the advent of the Cult Film and its own conflicted cultures. What any of this has to do with Wenders, I cannot say. Don Larsson ----------------------------------------------------------- Donald F. Larsson English Department, AH 230 Minnesota State University Mankato, MN 56001 ---- Online resources for film/TV studies may be found at ScreenSite http://www.tcf.ua.edu/ScreenSite