Author's Note
The final images involve the "global
department stores" a phenomenon of the twentieth
century where the streets of the metropolis become inverted
department stores through the proliferation of national
chains, such as the Gap, and the slow extinction of stores
of individual character. The cab driver, like the flaneur
in Paris, drifts among these commercial goods being at
once a part of the consumable landscape and invisible
within it, even reflecting or serving as vehicles for
these images (in the form of advertising marquees). J61,8;
M14a,1;M16a,4; m4,2; m4,7; m1a,6
Narration
"Within the man who abandons himself to it, the
crowd inspires a sort of drunkenness, one accompanied
by very specific illusions: the man flatters himself
that, on seeing a passerby swept along by the crowd,
he has accurately classified him, seen straight through
to the innermost recesses of his soul—all on the
basis of his external appearance." Exposé
1939 (p21)
Author's Note
This quote refers specifically to Benjamin’s reading
of Balzac, and generally, to issues of type versus individuality,
and if they are indeed different at all. There is a suggestion
that the blurring between type and individual is the bi-product
of empathy with the exchange value as well. J92,4; M8a,1;
M10,4; M11,3. This is a dialectical relationship—that
which is projected from the interior and that, which is
stamped from the exterior. J15a,1; N2a,3.
Multi-Media Essay Notes To help bridge the space between art and scholarship
each author has put together a series of notes to
his and her film.
These include the voiced-over words of Benjamin
(Narration) with appropriate
citation, other text where appropriate, and a discussion of the author's
intent (Author's Note).
Baudelaire Notes
Author's Note Images of porosity
Throughout my segment I strove to create a visual experience
that expressed a porosity of place, identity, history,
and time. Benjamin in his 1939 Exposé and in "The
Arcades Project" returns again and again to word-imagery
evocative of different types of porosity. In these collected
essays objects, people, signs, and street names may provide
windows to the past or portals to individual exploration
of memory. For our project, "New York, Capital of the XXth
Century," the images I chose and the montage method I used
were, when experienced as a totality, intended as catalysts
for this type of non-material or metaphysical travel.
Author's Note
Part I.
In short, the streets of Paris
Were set to rhyme. Hear how.
--Guillot, Dit des rues de Paris (1875)
The above quote taken from "P" in "The
Arcades Project" (p516), I chose to set the scene
for the following three segments, each of which explore
different aspects of the figure of the flaneur in the
capital of the XX century, New York City. Street names
occur in Benjamin’s writing as memory markers and
representative of lost meanings (Berlin Chronicle II.595;
P1a,2; P1a,6; P2,1; P3,5—see also On Language I.62).
Following the quote, Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie-Woogie
fades into a vintage subway map, the colors and grid structure
of Mondrian’s famous painting become one and then
gives way to the serendipitous artistry of urban development.
The map provides an entry into the porosity of place and
time; the grid of the planned city becomes the wilderness
of the flaneur. The slippage between present and past
and between reality and representation is suggested with
this transition from iconic painting to prosaic map.
Narration
"The Flaneur seeks refuge in the crowd. The crowd
is the veil through which the familiar city is transformed
for the flaneur into phantasmagoria. This phantasmagoria,
in which the city appears now as a landscape, now as
a room, seems later to have inspired the décor
of department stores, which thus put flanerie to work
for profit. In any case, department stores are the last
precincts of flanerie."—Exposé 1939
(p21)
Author's Note
The visual narrative I constructed to illustrate this
passage and simultaneously translate it into the twentieth
century of New York City, presents the taxi driver as
flaneur (unseen to maintain the anonymity of the flaneur
and represented by the yellow cab). The crowd is shown
and the taxi driver moves through it, unseen as an individual
but seeing the city as an unfolding experience of temporalities
and prompts setting memories in motions. The "landscape"
is not a landscape the taxi driver had (most likely) experienced
himself, but one that he sees on billboards and in magazine
ads, one which suggests the opportunities promised by
the city. The "room" is represented by the girls
drawing on the side walk, and suggests the fluidity of
interior and exterior spaces for the flaneur, a theme
central to Benjamin’s discussions of flanerie. L1,5
"The street becomes room and the room becomes street."
J59,2; M3a,4; M16,3; Q2a,7; R1a,7
"global
department stores" a phenomenon of the twentieth
century where the streets of the metropolis become inverted
department stores through the proliferation of national
chains, such as the Gap, and the slow extinction of stores
of individual character. The cab driver, like the flaneur
in Paris, drifts among these commercial goods being at
once a part of the consumable landscape and invisible
within it, even reflecting or serving as vehicles for
these images (in the form of advertising marquees). J61,8;
M14a,1;M16a,4; m4,2; m4,7; m1a,6
crowd
is the veil through which the familiar city is transformed
for the flaneur into phantasmagoria. This phantasmagoria,
in which the city appears now as a landscape, now as
a room, seems later to have inspired the décor
of department stores, which thus put flanerie to work
for profit. In any case, department stores are the last
precincts of flanerie."—Exposé 1939
(p21)