TY - THES ID - 138642495 TI - Moving Still, Still Moving: Lyric, Aura, and Diary in the "Here and Now" of Margaret Tait and Ute Aurand AU - Copman, Wiebe AU - Cohen, Nadja AU - KU Leuven. Faculteit Letteren. Opleiding Master in de literatuurwetenschappen (Leuven e.a.) PY - 2020 PB - Leuven KU Leuven. Faculteit Letteren DB - UniCat UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:138642495 AB - This essay is framed within a larger research project that tries to trace the notion of poetry in film. Although this is mainly a theoretical-philosophical study, I will center my research around German filmmaker Ute Aurand's film Rasendes Grün mit Pferden (2019) to explore the inherently lyrical nature of the diary film. Balancing lyrical theory and film theories on documentary and performativity, I build up my argument by analysing the poems of Scottish poet and filmmaker Margaret Tait, whose interdisciplinary oeuvre also relies on the essayistic portrait and diary modes. First, I argue how Walter Benjamin's notion of aura lies at the heart of lyricism; in this relationship between the original artwork, the aura and the reproduction, I recognise similarities with the debate on lyricism and reality. Then, I show how the diary film explicitly maintains a complex relationship with the “here and now” of the auratic experience. According to Benjamin, aura is lost in the reproduction of the original; however, I argue a lyrical reality is brought into being by the essayistic performativity of the diary film, allowing the copy to set up as much of an auratic dialectic between beholder and beheld as the so-called original. I trace the lyrical aura of the "here and now" in the work of Aurand and Tait, convinced that they try to repeat their auratic, daily encounters with reality on a textual or audiovisual level. Finally, I draw attention to the way in which aura informs film exhibition as well. ER -