The Blair Witch Project -- a gem that both terrified and intrigued me.When Blair Witch Project was released I was under the impression that the film was an actual documentary of one groups struggle to hunt a Blair Witch in the middle of the woods. As German cultural critic Walter Benjamin explains in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, the 'aura' of a film is its ability to create a sense of awe experienced in presenting such a unique work of art (in this case, the Blair Witch Project's effect on the audience).
“...for the first time – and this is the effect of the film – man has to operate with his whole living person, yet forgoing its aura. For aura is tied to his presence; there can be no replica of it. The aura which, on the stage, emanates from Macbeth, cannot be separated for the spectators from that of the actor. However, the singularity of the shot in the studio is that the camera is substituted for the public. Consequently, the aura that envelops the actor vanishes, and with it the aura of the figure he portrays.”
Blair Witch Project mystified audiences upon release because it was never revealed whether or not it was an actual documentary. It took American audiences on a roller coaster not knowing what was around the next corner -- The film is a more assertive attempt to cutting into reality and shows that if an audience is left to believe something is true not knowing the pretense, they will believe the director's vision and realism the film portrays.
“Magician and surgeon compare to painter and cameraman. The painter maintains in his work a natural distance from reality, the cameraman penetrates deeply into its web. There is a tremendous difference between the pictures they obtain. That of the painter is a total one, that of the cameraman consists of multiple fragments which are assembled under a new law. Thus, for contemporary man the representation of reality by the film is incomparably more significant than that of the painter, since it offers, precisely because of the thoroughgoing permeation of reality with mechanical equipment, an aspect of reality which is free of all equipment. And that is what one is entitled to ask from a work of art."
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