The Left-Handed Blow

I first read Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" during my freshman year, in an advanced film theory course at Clark University. Required reading. It was in Illuminations, the collection of his essays edited by Hannah Arendt. I was seventeen, always young for my grade, having basically skipped kindergarten, and was thirsting for the knowledge I thought I'd need to begin my life as an artist, as a filmmaker. It was autumn, and I distinctly remember standing on a street corner in downtown Worcester, traffic passing, watching a man in a wool coat buy a newspaper from a machine. Benjamin's words about aura and reproduction circled in my head. I turned the pages in my mind as the man disappeared into a donut shop, feeling the first stirrings of what I thought was understanding.

Benjamin’s argument, written in 1935, is that mechanical reproduction destroys the aura of the artwork - that quality of being singular, present. He was specifically writing about photography. A painting exists once; a photograph of it can exist everywhere simultaneously. The reproduction severs the work from its "fabric of tradition," from the specific time and place and hand that made it. Benjamin thought this was potentially liberating, but also unsettling. That is to say, by democratizing art, it opened the door to the aestheticization of politics, which he watched happen in real time with fascism.

That last part deserves a pause. Benjamin was a Jewish intellectual watching the Nazis use mass media - radio, film, spectacle - to manufacture political reality at scale. The essay isn't just about art. It's a warning about what happens when the tools of reproduction become tools of manipulation, when images stop being accountable to anything real.

And here we are again. History doesn't repeat, but it rhymes - and the rhyme right now is sharp. We have generative AI capable of producing photorealistic deepfakes of political figures, synthetic media that can fabricate speeches never given at events that never happened, and a geopolitical environment favoring authoritarianism. Benjamin's fear that the mechanical image could be weaponized to aestheticize power isn't a historical curiosity. It’s a live wire.

That's the backdrop.

Another memory. It's the early 1980s, and I'm watching 2001: A Space Odyssey for the first time, at a movie night in the synagogue where my father is the rabbi, in Brooklyn. The setup: two sixteen-millimeter projectors side by side in the back of the ballroom, folding chairs in rows, a screen above the stage. The room smells of floor wax and popcorn. When the monolith appears on screen, I grip the chair's edges until my fingers hurt. Entranced, terrified, awestruck. Is this the aura in action?

Within Benjamin’s framework, film already had an aura problem. It was always a mechanically reproduced art form, which is part of why critics for decades argued about whether it even was art. But, over time, filmmakers built an aura around authorship: Think Welles, Kubrick, Cassavetes, Bergman, Kurosawa, Scorsese. The director became the singular hand behind the multiplied object. AI threatens that compensation. When a model trained on the collective output of cinema can generate a "Kubrickian" shot in seconds, the question isn't just "where did the image come from" - it's "where did the intention come from." As Benjamin showed with photography and painting, the aura was always partly a fiction about the artist. AI makes that fiction harder to maintain.

So we go back to the essay. Benjamin distinguished between the cult value of art - its almost sacred, ritual function, the way you possess it and it has power - and its exhibition value, its availability and democratic spread. AI-generated imagery has essentially zero cult value in Benjamin's terms. It has no unique origin, no hand, no moment of making. This is precisely why so many artists react viscerally to it. It feels like a category violation. It feels like someone pissing in the baptismal font.

Meanwhile, the practical landscape has caught up to the philosophical one. Social media is now flooded with fake AI-generated movie trailers, with creators racking up likes and views by exploiting studio IP and actor likenesses. The studios' response has been revealing: rather than issuing takedowns, they're quietly claiming monetization on these videos, profiting from content that uses AI-generated versions of their own talent without consent. The talent unions, understandably, call it a race to the bottom. And yet enforcement remains inconsistent at best, because the studios themselves can't decide whether these fake trailers are free marketing or intellectual property theft. Hollywood is in a don't ask, don't tell moment.

I sit at my desk. I should be preparing my taxes, tallying up how much I made this year, how much we spent. Outside, a neighbor is shoveling in front of his house, the scrape of his shovel against the concrete. In the basement, in the boiler room, I know a pipe is leaking, driving up my water bill. The plumber wants a lot of money to fix it, and this kind of repair - steam piping - is enough outside my circle of competence that I know I must relent. And I think, this confusion - institutional, philosophical, economic - about what things are worth, what labor costs, what knowledge matters - it fills the space around us like oxygen. We have no choice but to breathe it. The question is what happens inside our bodies once we do.

But the aura problem and the fake trailer problem are both, in a sense, abstractions - philosophical puzzles that are removed from the daily reality of making a living in this business. The part that doesn't feel abstract at all is the labor picture.

The film industry is contracting, and it's contracting along every axis at once. Those not in the business find this surprising. And so I explain: fewer productions are getting greenlit. Budgets are shrinking. Post-production schedules are compressing. The people who do the actual physical and technical work of making films and television - DPs, sound mixers, editors, camera operators, grips, colorists - are watching their year-over-year income move in one direction: down. I know this firsthand. My own income has declined steadily, and every conversation I have with colleagues lands in the same territory: people who were working full-time three years ago now describe themselves as "semi-retired."

Which brings me to why I'm writing this. I recently launched a podcast called Films Not Made, co-hosted with Amy Hobby, an Academy Award-nominated producer. The premise is this: we invite filmmakers to tell us about a project they never got to make - one that fell apart in development, lost financing, got shelved - and then, using generative AI, we create speculative material of what the film might have looked like. Imagined casting, a new pitch deck, even mock trailers. The filmmaker watches it happen and reacts in real time. Think of it as a development session crossed with a séance.

Amy is the kind of person who, in any rational version of this industry, should have a clear path to making a living. Producing, for many at her level, has become what amounts to a free service - years of development work, relationship management, creative problem-solving, and risk absorption, often with no compensation until a project actually gets financed, which increasingly it doesn't. Yes, this has always been a hard business with long odds. But it's undeniably worse now.

You may now be asking: Isn’t this an AI problem? Not completely. The contraction predates the current wave of generative tools - it's driven by previous over-investment, subsequent consolidation, by the collapse of the peak-TV bubble, by risk-averse financing, by a global pandemic, by an industry that has been shedding the middle for years. But, yes, AI is accelerating it. When a studio can generate a rough cut of a trailer without hiring an editor, or produce concept art without commissioning an artist, or synthesize a temp score without booking a composer, we see the org chart being built live. Just as in other parts of the economy, the ideal business size is looking more and more like just one person and an infinite number of AI agents.

But here's what I can't dismiss: these same tools expanded what this show could be. Films Not Made has editors, a producer, a production pipeline - we're not replacing anyone. But the speculative visuals, the imagined casting, the synthetic frames of films that were never shot - no realistic budget would have covered that work the traditional way. It simply wouldn't have existed. The AI didn't replace a crew. It created something that was never going to be crewed in the first place. And that distinction matters, because the loudest version of the democratization argument - that anyone with a laptop can now make a film - papers over the fact that most of what's worth making still requires human labor, human judgment, human craft. What the tools actually do, at least right now, is widen the space of what a small team can attempt. The question hangs: does this widening come at someone else's expense? I know the answer, and I don't want to say it. I know the answer, and I say it anyway: sometimes yes, sometimes no, and always both at once.

This is the context that makes the philosophical questions real. Benjamin's "aura" isn't just an aesthetic concept when the person who used to provide the human craft behind the image is no longer getting the call. And the question of what AI means for filmmaking isn't theoretical when you can watch it play out in real time in lengthening gaps between gigs.

Films Not Made sits in a very specific place within this landscape, and it's worth being precise about where. We're not generating fake performances and presenting them as real. That’s a deepfake and, in my opinion, context matters. We're visualizing unmade films - speculative casting, imagined versions of what a project might have looked like - clearly framed as "what if." The AI imagery on our show exists in the same register as a ripomatic, lookbook deck, a mood board, a director's sketch of who they imagined in a role. It's the visual language of development and even sales, not production. And it’s an expansion of artists’ reach.

The ethical line we hold is transparency. We're not claiming these are real. We're using them the way a filmmaker uses a reference image - to point at an intention - and we're doing it explicitly, openly, with the filmmaker in the room commenting on the result. Sometimes the AI nails the tone and it's eerie. Sometimes it misses and it's hilarious. Either way, the result sparks a real conversation between our guests, our hosts, and even our often-misinformed AI "executive" avatars who drop in with notes.

I'm aware of the objection. We use likenesses of real actors - people who didn't sign a release for our show. That's a legitimate concern, and I don't want to wave it away. But I think the controversy over AI likenesses is fundamentally a contract dispute dressed up as a philosophical one. The real questions are consent and compensation - who profits, who agreed, who gets credit. Those questions are being fought most loudly on the terrain of big-budget productions replacing working actors with synthetic versions to avoid paying them. That is a genuine harm, and it deserves the fight it's getting. What we do is different in kind: speculative imagery, clearly identified, in the context of a conversation with the filmmaker about their own unmade work. Context matters - or it should.

There's also a deeper concern, and I want to name it even though I can't resolve it. The models we use were trained on the collective visual output of a century of cinema - frames, compositions, lighting setups, performances - without the consent or compensation of the people who made that work. Every "Kubrickian" shot the model generates carries, somewhere in its weights, the actual labor of actual cinematographers, gaffers, set designers, and actors who were never asked and will never be paid. This is the original sin of generative AI, and no amount of editorial framing or transparency makes it disappear. I use these tools knowing this. I don't have a clean answer for it, only the cold comfort that whatever comes next might look more like Jaron Lanier's data dignity - a framework where the people whose work trained the models actually get compensated - than outright prohibition. But the people who are angry about it are not wrong to be angry.

None of that disappears. But here's what Films Not Made actually does, and why I think it still matters despite all of it. The show puts the human intention back in conversation with the mechanical image, rather than letting the machine have the final word. The filmmaker sits right there, reacting, correcting, laughing, wincing - and the audience watches that negotiation happen in real time. In this way we are building up the aura, because if it exists anywhere in this process, it lives in the encounter between the person who carried the unmade project for years and the synthetic image that tries, imperfectly, to show them what it might have been.

Benjamin wrote at a moment when the reproduction technology was photography and film itself. He couldn't have imagined a technology that doesn't just reproduce existing artworks but generates new ones from abstracted layers of vectors of everything that came before. However, his core insight still holds: the question is never really about the technology. It's about what relationship we maintain between the human and the image, between intention and output. That is to say, when we talk about technology, we talk about ourselves.

Like Benjamin, I think that all human knowledge takes the form of interpretation. And if that's true, and I think it is, then what AI does isn't entirely alien to human cognition. It interprets. Every generated image, every synthetic trailer, every hallucinated frame is an interpretation of training data, of a prompt, of statistical patterns in language and image. The difference is that the human version of interpretation comes with a bill of lading: intention, context, stakes, and accountability. The machine version arrives empty. That gap - between interpretation with a soul and interpretation without one - is exactly where Films Not Made lives. The filmmaker brings the intention. The AI brings the interpretation.

Back to me. Here's what no one tells you about working with these tools: most of it is waiting. I specify lenses. I specify film stock. I describe the quality of afternoon light through a particular kind of window. Sometimes I describe the emotion I want the frame to carry, which is often like giving stage direction to a calculator. And then I hit generate, and I wait.

While I'm waiting, I think about what I've become: the one-person org chart. I learned to code before I learned to load a film magazine. My family had a computer early, and a family friend taught me to build databases by hand - I was ten, maybe eleven. Everything after that I taught myself. After college, I paid rent between film jobs writing software for financial institutions, the kind of code that gave private bankers insights on how to move client assets while I was trying to figure out how to move a camera across a room. Which is all to say - I've always loved computers, always recognized I could use them to amplify my ideas, and in some ways always looked forward to the time we're living in now. And now that it's here, I find myself sitting alone in front of a screen, typing descriptions of camera moves and lighting setups into a text box.

I am also, in the most literal sense, just the meat between the chair and the keyboard - the PEBCAK, as tech support would say. Problem Exists Between Chair And Keyboard. That's me - the human in the loop. I'm the one who knows that the DP on this unmade film would have shot it handheld, or that the director wanted everything backlit, or that the casting idea was insane but also kind of perfect. The machine doesn't know any of that. I do. And so I type it in, and I wait, and sometimes what comes back is extraordinary, and sometimes it's nonsense, and either way I regenerate and try again.

It's solitary work. It's nothing like being on a set, and sometimes I’m grateful for that. No punishing hours. No time away from my family. No crappy catering. I can wrap when I want. But, there's also no one to bounce an idea off of, no happy accidents from a crew member doing something unexpected. It's just me and the model and the cursor. And yet - there's something in it. A new kind of craft, maybe. Or the ghost of one. And I kind of love it.

I believe that now through the 2030s will be an era of human-AI paired creativity - two intelligences collaborating, each compensating for what the other lacks. And then, likely, the decade after that will be about who has the best AI producing the best, most personalized agentic entertainment for an audience of one. A smaller, mostly human-made industry will remain - vital, beautiful, expensive, and attended by fewer and fewer people. Where will I be in that universe? I don't know. Maybe still sitting in front of a computer, specifying a lens, waiting for the render, wondering if what I just described is a movie or a memory or something else entirely.

So here's where we land. The tools exist. They're powerful, and they're getting better fast - the gap between what they could do in 2023 and what they can do right now is staggering, and the gap between now and next year will be larger. We didn't create the atmosphere. But we are trying to exist in it thoughtfully - with the filmmakers whose stories we're telling, with their participation, with their reactions on camera, and with a willingness to sit in the discomfort of what these tools mean rather than pretending the discomfort isn't there.

If Films Not Made has a thesis, it's this: artists will always continue to tell stories. And we know this to be true because the stories on the show are still there. The process mattered. The unmade work still shaped the people who carried it. And now we have new ways to look at it, test it, argue with it, and maybe even bring something back. Not to replace what was lost, but to give it one more moment in the light.

My friend Joe Maggio - a film director and one of our guests on Films Not Made - likes to quote Benjamin: "All the decisive blows are struck left-handed." He says it often enough that it's become a kind of shorthand between us, a reminder that the best moves in any creative life tend to come sideways, from the least expected places, from the thing you spent the least amount of time working on, from instinct rather than plan.

Remembering this, I went back and looked up the source. It comes from the "Chinese Curio" section of Benjamin's 1928 book One Way Street - seven years before the mechanical reproduction essay, when he was thinking less about mass media and more about how to live in a world that was already accelerating. The full passage reads: "These are days when no one should rely unduly on his competence. Strength lies in improvisation. All the decisive blows are struck left-handed."

That feels like the truest thing I can end on. None of us should be relying on our so-called competence right now - not the filmmakers, writers, actors, and artists watching the industry contract, not the critics or policymakers trying to draw lines around something that moves faster than it took for you to read this essay. The acceleration is accelerating. The old expertise, the talent - it’s all still necessary, but it's not sufficient. What's needed now is the ability to improvise - to work with what's in front of you, even when what's in front of you is strange and unsettled, and you feel like the problem between the chair and the keyboard.

That's what Films Not Made is. An improvisation. A left-handed blow. We'll see where it lands.