The operation of the camera supplied Pirandello with an image for a new detachment from life as it unfolds before one. Gubbio watches, observes, records, but remains unmoved by the dramas enacted before him. This professional attitude becomes a model for his behavior in all situations, extending to the complex love triangles of past betrayal and future revenge that make up the off-screen drama enacted by the personnel of Kosmograph Studio. Gubbio strives to remain detached -- "impassive," as he puts it -- a modern man trapped within his observing self-consciousness, alienated from both action and affection.

[...] Pirandello's comments on film in Shoot! played an important role in Walter Benjamin's influential discussion of cinema in "The Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproducibility," published in 1936, with Benjamin emphasizing that the passing time and even the transition to sound film had done "little to diminish their relevance."

Benjamin drew specifically on Gubbio's discussion of the camera's alienating effect on film actors, depriving the performers of all the contingent elements of their living reality [...] Pirandello expressed here the uneasiness that many intellectuals and artists felt when they first encountered the cinematic image, disturbed (and simultaneously fascinated by) its mute, colorless, abstract, and even ghostly aspect. Benjamin brilliantly related this experience of lack to the cinema's destruction of the actor's aura, the unique presence of an individual personality. When the apparatus substitutes for an audience, Benjamin claimed, the actor is stripped bare by the camera's gaze -- as Pirandello phrases it, the actor becomes "exiled from himself" -- only to be presented later in this reduced state before an audience who cannot experience the aura of live presence.