Unlike in a theatre performance, the actor's performance on the silver screen is one carefully crafted and manipulated by a production crew. The actor isn't performing in front of a live audience but the apparatus (camera). Their role is more like a prop and they are aware of the fact that the unseen masses will have control over it. This estrangement that the actor feels is self-alienating and they are stripped of their "aura."

The ability to carefully craft such "reality which is free of all equipment" can lead to constructive purposes as well though. Film allows us to represent and capture our environments and give us further "insight into the necessities governing our lives."