In The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, Walter Benjamin develops a primarily sociological function of film which was to prepare the subject for the accelerated rhythm of modern life, just as the viewer needed to sharpen his cognitive abilities to understand the action that flickers in front of him in quick succession. Outside the cinema, paying attention to the cars, the elbowing crowd, and the shop-windows on the city’s streets needed to be trained, and movies were the perfect opportunity to do so. Therefore, the actor’s body in front of the camera had to be subjugated to a number of “mechanised tests” (Benjamin, p. 30), with the best performance being the most unequivocally readable one, so that it would assist with the training of the audience. We can see how the optimistic outlook of Balázs is becoming ambivalent with Benjamin. This is evident when Benjamin compares the actor’s performance with the worker’s in the factories:

Meanwhile the work process, especially since it has been standardised by the assembly line, daily generates countless mechanised tests. These tests are performed unawares, and those who fail are excluded from the work process (ibid.).

Rather than expressing its unique being, the human body in front of the camera undergoes a dressage and is reduced to a number of typed movements and expressions: Say, the expressions of fear, awe, sadness, determination. This becomes evident when we watch the more mass-produced silent movies, in the majority of which we are confronted with types: The type of the hero, the damsel in distress, the criminal. This, though, does not lie in the essence of film, but rather in its production. Being very expensive, movies had to reach a wide audience to be profitable, and hence had to be understood and enjoyed by as many people as possible, not only on a national, but an international scale. This affiliation of film to capital was perceived by Balázs as well:

The gesture that determines the action’s course and meaning must be understandable for the most different peoples, otherwise the movie won’t make profit. The language of gesture is quasi normalised in film (Balázs, p. 22).

Benjamin’s ambivalence towards film, an invention which, in The Work of Art, he generally sees in a positive light, needs to be seen exactly in this connection to capital, whose aim towards profitability reduces human beings to mere instruments on and off screen (as we have seen in the association of film with the assembly line above). The interests of the capitalist class in film as a new means of exploitation, one that is aided by advertisement and the ‘movie star system’, is impoverishing its utopian potential, which lies in the masses becoming visible to themselves and thereby becoming self-aware, an actual political class — the proletariat:

All this [the publicity machine] in order to distort and corrupt the original and justified interest of the masses in film — an interest in understanding themselves and therefore their class. Thus, the same is true of film capital in particular as of fascism in general: a compelling urge toward new social opportunities is being clandestinely exploited in the interests of a property-owning minority. For this reason alone, the expropriation of film capital is an urgent demand for the proletariat (Benjamin, p. 34).

The critical point of film in the capitalist system therefore lies in the confrontation of the human body with the apparatus, be it in front of the camera or the screen. This dynamic is paralleled with the worker’s life outside the cinema, as in both cases, the body is forced to perform, to achieve results in the form of profit for the owners —the audience, by improving its reaction time to modern life and modern machines; the actor, by maintaining the film’s profitability. In both cases, also, the body needs to ‘in-corporate’ a certain set of gestures that comprise its whole ‘grammar’ and ‘vocabulary’ — tightening screws, pulling levers, rotating wheels, clocking in and out. This standardisation not only aims for the improved efficiency of work, but also for the worker’s substitutability, as these simple gestures can be learned by anyone. Even though the movie stars emanate an aura of untouchability, they too are measured against their ability to bring in profit, and will be gotten rid of as quickly as the ‘defective’ worker. They both are “tested” in front of the apparatus, subjected to the same logic of utility.

The apparatus sets a fixed and external notion of utility, one that is general in as far as it does not address anyone in specific (only the ‘work force’, the ‘human capital’) and thereby elicits a semblance of neutrality. Just like the camera only shows ‘what is there’, the socio-political apparatus becomes an intermediary between the body and the world, a contact which it channels and modifies. The audience therefore doesn’t identify itself directly with the actor, it does so by its intermediary, the apparatus: “The audience only empathises with the actor by empathising with the camera. It assumes its stance: it tests” (Benjamin, The Work of Art: 3. edition, my translation quoted from the Suhrkamp edition, p. 488). Subjugated by the apparatus, the body’s language is reduced to stereotypical movements, filtering out all the ‘unnecessary’ elements, the ones that express its uniqueness — as we will see in the following quote, Benjamin does not propose an anti-technological solution, but rather an inversion of the power relation within cinema. And it is within cinema that we can witness how this might look, when we see Charlie Chaplin in his Modern Times, counteracting the body’s systematic subjugation with an unlikely weapon — laughter.