Footnote #47 - Aura

The Fantasy/Animation podcast takes listeners on a journey through the intersection between fantasy cinema and the medium of animation. Available via Apple Podcasts, Spotify and many of your favourite podcast hosting platforms!

Art’s relationship to the auratic is the focus of Footnote #47, which engages cinema’s historical relation to ‘aura’ via the foundational work of Walter Benjamin who argued for technology’s “withering” of art’s uniqueness of space and time thanks to the potential for the creation of a “plurality of copies” that shift art’s “unique existence.” Topics include photography’s reproducibility that creates ontological tensions between the ‘original’ and ‘copy'; processes of perception, proximity, and distance; and how for Benjamin, aura seemingly liquidated tradition in the age of invasive capitalism.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Suggested Readings

• Benjamin, Walter. 2002 [1936]. “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version.” In Selected Writings, Volume 3, 1935–1938, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, 101-133. Massachussetts: Harvard University Press.

• Benjamin, Walter. 1999. “Little History of Photography” [1931]. In Selected Writings, Volume 2, Part 2, 1931–1934, eds. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, 507-530. Trans. Rodney Livingstone, Massachussetts: Harvard University Press.

• Geulen, Eva. 2002. “Walter Benjamin’s “Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.”” In Benjamin's Ghosts: Interventions in Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory, ed. Gerhard Richter. 121-141. Sanford, California: Stanford University Press.

• Hansen, Miriam Bratu. 2012. Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.