Phrase: "Film responds to the shrivelling of the aura by..."

“Film responds to the shriveling of the aura by artificially building up the ‘personality’ outside the studio” (261).

Benjamin focuses throughout this piece on art’s “aura” and the destruction it faces through reproductions. The art of film, however, works to correct this destruction through its actors’ lives outside of film. We have multiple magazines and television shows focused solely on what actors are wearing, eating, and doing outside of the movies, but how realistic are these portrayals? Benjamin has little faith in them, arguing that while the studios are attempting to uphold the artistic merit of film, they are essentially doing the opposite by creating false personalities that do not encourage the “aura,” as defined by Benjamin earlier in his piece.

Benjamin, Watler. "The Work of Art in the Age of the Technological Reproducibility." Selected Writings: Volume 4 1938-1940. Ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003.