Walter Benjamin's Mimesis In Man With A Movie Camera

Being mimetic is to be practicing mimesis or imitating the real world through art. This is the purest intent of documentaries as they are created with the purpose of documenting the world as it is believed to be. In the process of showing the world, filmmakers encounter barriers of what they cannot show due to technological limitations. In these moments, recreation and imitation are used to mimic what we normally could not see. Examples of this are best seen in documentaries of the human body, outer space, or history where the camera is incapable of capturing the desired image and tools such as animations, reenactments, and camera manipulation are used. Therefore, documentaries are of the mimetic genre for the reasons given above. An example of a documentary that we watched in class whose creator was said to be attributed to the “‘mimetic faculty’, the human ‘gift of seeing resemblances’”(Turvey 29) is Walter Benjamin’s Man with a Movie Camera.

Mimesis in "Man with a Movie Camera". In the article he discusses how Benjamin takes a physical camera and personifies it to mimic the actions of a human to better illustrate the camera’s ability to see through its own eye or lens. Benjamin’s mimesis in this film is best summarized as “[a] verbal metaphor based on morphological similarities between the camera and human beings”(Turvey 29). This extended metaphor seen in this documentary is no different than the tools listed earlier that better allow documentaries to communicate the reality depicted. Furthermore, Man with a Movie Camera exemplifies how documentaries can be mimetic while still holding true to the roots of what makes it a