The Bicycle Theives, On The Waterfront, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

Many things can be found in the two video clips that could be distinguish as something a Marxist critic might have pointed out. In the opening of The Bicycle thieves, a Marxist critic may point out the obvious display of the mob of people on the street as the working class, the proletariat. Another obvious distinction is the inability to change social status, such as when the man who is giving out the job says "You’re a bricklayer. That’s a different category". As said in Walter Benjamin’s essay "To an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility."I would assume that the work of a bricklayer is reproducible and is when it was first used, it was created to be easily reproduce. In the clip, On The Waterfront, there is also an obvious depiction of the proletariat. The difference that I have found in this film is the description that describes the movie as a movie about an ex-prize fighter turned longshoreman struggles to stand up to his corrupt union bosses. The ex-prize fighter as trying to change his status from a prize fighter to join into the working class of the proletarians. But is unable to because his status is known and is in a way "catching up" with him. "For the first time, captions have become obligatory. And it is clear that they have an altogether different character than the title of a painting." I think this statement from Benjamin works well with this video clip because it can loosely be interpreted as, the status of the prized fighter, Terry Malloy, as being the "caption" which explain who he is but it is incorrect to who he is.