V
As individual instances of artistic production become emancipated from the context of religious ritual, opportunities for displaying the products increase. The ‘displayability’ of a portrait bust, which is capable of being dispatched hither and thither, exceeds that of a god statue, whose fixed place is inside the temple. The displayability of the panel painting is greater than that of the mosaic or fresco that preceded it.

VI
In photography, display value starts to drive cultic value back along the whole line. However, cultic value does not give ground without resistance. It occupies one last ditch, and that is the human face. It is no accident, not at all, that the portrait forms the centrepiece of early photography. In the cult of recalling absent or dead loved ones, the cultic value of image finds its last refuge. In the transient expression of a human countenance in early photographs, we catch one final glimpse of aura. It is this that gives them their melancholic, matchless beauty. [...] Atget snaps clues. With Atget, photographs become exhibits in the trial that is history. That is what constitutes their hidden political significance. [...] They unsettle the viewer; he feels obliged to find a specific way of approaching them. At the same time the illustrated journals start to erect signposts, suggesting that way. Right or wrong - no matter. In them the caption first become obligatory. And clearly this possessed a quite different character than the title of a painting. Shortly afterwards, the directives that the viewer of pictures in the illustrated press receives via the caption become even more precise and imperious in film, where the way in which each individual image is apprehended appears to be dictated by the sequence of all that have gone before.

VIII
stage actor vs screen actor
The latter has two consequences. The apparatus that mediates the performance of the screen actor to the audience is not obliged to respect that performance as an entity. Guided by its operator, the camera comments on the performance continuously. The outcome of that running commentary, which the editor then assembles from material supplied, is the film as finally put together. It includes a certain number of movements that need to be recognized as those of the camera itself - not to mention such special settings as close-ups. [...] The audience empathizes with the performer only by empathizing with the camera.

IX
The latter's performance is not a single entity; it consists of many individual performances. Along with such incidental considerations as studio hire, availability of partners, setting and so on, basic mechanical requirements break the screen actor’s performance down into a series of episodes that can then be assembled. [...] 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.

XI
How does the cameraman relate to the painter? [...] The surgeon constitutes one pole of an arrangement in which the other is occupied by the magician. The stance of the magician healing an invalid by laying-on of hands differs from that of the surgeon performing an operation on that invalid. The magician maintains the natural distance between himself and the patient; to be precise, he reduces it only slightly (by virtue of a laying-on of hands) while increasing it (by virtue of his authority) hugely. The surgeon does the opposite: he reduces the distance to the patient a great deal (by actually going inside him) and increases it only a little (through the care with which his hand moves among the latter's organs). In short, unlike the magician (still a latent presence in the medical practitioner), the surgeon abstains at the crucial moment from facing his invalid person to person, invading him surgically instead.
Magician and surgeon behave like painter and camera-man. The painter, while working, observes a natural distance from the subject; the cameraman, on the other hand, penetrates deep into the subject's tissue. The images they both come up with are enormously different. The painter's is an entity, the cameraman's chopped up into a large number of pieces, which find their way back together by following a new law. That is why the filmic portrayal of reality is of such incomparably greater significance to people today, because it continues to provide the camera-free aspect of reality that they are entitled to demand of a work of art precisely by using the camera to penetrate that reality so thoroughly.

Notes
16.
Leonardo compares painting and music like this: 'Painting is superior to music because it need not die as soon as it has received life, as is the case with poor music [...]. Music, which vanishes the moment after it comes into being, is no match for painting, which with the use of varnish has become eternal.

21.
Much as for Dadaism, film also provides important insights as regards Cubism and Futurism. Both look like incomplete experiments on the part of art to take account of the way in which the camera has permeated reality. Unlike film, these schools performed their experiments not by creating an alloy from portrayed reality plus portrayed camera. In Cubism, the chief role was played by a sort of premonition of the camera's construction, based on optics; in Futurism by a premonition of the cinematographic effects brought out by the rapid movement of the filmstrip through the camera.