Benjamin and The Blair Witch

In The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Walter Benjamin, the author states that “...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.”; when applying this notion to The Blair Witch Project, the pioneer fake documentary that became a surprising blockbuster in 1999, one can interpret the film as using the aura of "reality". The film succeeds in tricking the viewer into believing that the actors are real people in a real situation, it therefore offers the illusion of the aura described by Benjamin. The character's backgrounds and complex emotional features are not prominently depicted as the idea conveyed by the movie is to have the spectator identify not with the character's personalities, but with the fact that they are real. The aura existent in Blair Witch is more about the situation, the scary forest, the environment, the ambiance created by the camera shots and the protagonists reaction's to their surroundings.

In the following statement, Benjamin also claims“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.” Blair Witch alleges to be dealing with reality and the editing is therefore nonexistent, since we are supposedly watching a piece of film that was found in the woods and presented as it was shot. For that matter, there is no equipment, no fancy machinery that would increase the quality of the images, there is only "reality". The fact that the viewer believes to be watching a piece of amateur film, makes it even more real, as if he or she was in the forest in that terrifying situation, totally disengaged and unaware of any equipment.