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Benjamin argues for correspondences among three types of changes: in the economic mode of production, in the nature of art and in categories of perception. At the base of industrial society lies the assembly line and mass production. Technological innovation allows these processes to extend into the domain of art, separating off from its traditional ritual (or 'cult') value a new and distinct market (or 'exhibition') value. The transformation also strips art of its 'aura' by which Benjamin means its authenticity, its attachment to the domain of tradition: The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced. 2 The aura of an object compels attention. Whether a work of art or natural landscape, we confront it in one place and only one place. We discover its use value in the exercise of ritual, in that place, with that object, or in the contemplation of the object for its uniqueness. The object in possession of aura, natural or historical, inanimate or human, engages us as if it had 'the power to look back in return'. 3 One thing mechanical reproduction cannot, by definition, reproduce is authenticity. This is at the heart of the change it effects in the work of art. 'Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual' (p 224). The former basis in ritual Walter Benjamin, 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction', in Illuminations, translated by Harry Zohn, New York, Schocken Books, 1969, p 221. (Further page references from this essay will be given in the text.

How is it that the most formal and, often, the most abstract of films and the most political, and sometimes, didactic of films arise, fruitfully intermingle, and then separate in a common historical moment? What motivated this separation and to what extent did it both succeed and fail? Our understanding of the relationship between documentary film and the modernist avant-garde requires revision. Specifically, we need to recon-This essay grew from numerous sources of encouragement and stimulation. A commission to write on the coming of sound to documentary for La Transicion del mudo al sonoro, vol. 6 of Historia general del cine, ed. Javier Maqua and Manuel Palacio (Madrid, 1996) first caused me to wonder if the early history of documentary did not require significant revision. An invitation by Kees Bakker, director of the Joris Ivens Foundation, to deliver a keynote address at an international conference on Ivens's career in 1998 led me to take my first extended look at the relationship between early documentary and the modernist avantgarde. The conference papers were published as Joris Ivens and the Documentary Context, ed. Kees Bakker (Amsterdam, 1999). In the fall of 1999, the acting director of the Getty Research Institute's Scholars and Seminars Program, Michael Roth, invited me to give a talk, "Documentary Film and Modernism," in a lecture series on "The Construction of Historical Meaning" that provided the occasion for me to revisit the history of documentary in a sustained way. I am extremely grateful to the Getty Research Institute for their support during the 1999-2000 academic year when I conducted research and prepared the present, revised version of my lecture, and, especially, to Sabine Schlosser, for editorial assistance. I benefited greatly from the comments and suggestions made during the question-andanswer session following my lecture there and from written feedback by Stefan Jonnson.