Benjamin’s writings on film are justly renowned for their twin theses of the transformation of the concept of art by its ‘technical reproducibility’ and the new possibilities for collective experience this contains, in the wake of the historical decline of the ‘aura’ of the work of art, a process that film is presented as definitively concluding. Much ink has been spilt debating the thesis of the decline of the aura in Benjamin’s work. On the one hand, with regard to some of his writings, Benjamin’s concept of aura has been accused of fostering a nostalgic, purely negative sense of modernity as loss—loss of unity both with nature and in community (A. Benjamin 1989). On the other hand, in the work on film, Benjamin appears to adopt an affirmative technological modernism, which celebrates the consequences of the decline. Adorno, for one, felt betrayed by the latter position. He wrote to Benjamin on 18 March 1936: 