Aura of Blair Witch Project

The Blair Witch Project is a 1999 film that presents itself as a documentary. In reality this film is just a narrative however it does have the power to convince its viewers that this story could be a documentary. The plot line of three people going into the woods, get lost while shooting their own documentary, and eventually killed while their equipment and tapes are found a year later makes the storyline believable. They went so far to try to capture reality that they made a website about these three characters, their make believe backgrounds, and interviews with their unreal family members as well. The mission of the film was to capture the aura of true reality taking place something that Walter Benjamin claims cannot happen in film. He writes “...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” in his essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. He states that aura comes from the feeling of an original artwork making something the “one and only” opposed to mechanical reproduction. Having something be original and true (reality) gives power to whoever has it. By saying that the Blair Witch Project captures the aura of these people because it is seen by some of its viewers as a documentary would be false because it can be mass reproduced. However, I think if it were in fact a documentary that was captured it still would not present the aura that Benjamin describes in his essay. This is because no matter what, we do not see the entire story; things are edited from the film whereas a play even though it can be repeated the actor, if it is the same actor every night, changes even if it’s only a little his movement, facial expressions, not everything in the play being rerun is as solid as a film being rerun. Film captures aura in a dissected way through editing and changes things in a minute detail to capture a hyper reality. Although The Blair Witch Project was a good attempt at showing reality and capturing the aura and presence of real people it does not fully follow under the definition of Benjamin’s aura in which it is something that is original which gives a power relationship of those who have it and those who don’t.