Sunday, November 23, 2014

Walter Benjamin


Even if one has a general knowledge of the way people walk, one knows nothing of a person's posture during the fractional second of a stride. The act of reaching for a lighter or a spoon is a familiar routine, yet we hardly know what really goes on between hand and metal, not to mention how this fluctuates with our moods. Here the camera intervenes with the resources of its lowerings and liftings, its interruptions and isolations, its extensions and accelerations, its enlargements and reductions. The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.

 

I chose this passage by Walter Benjamin because it explains a routine.  It shows the repetitive of people and how a picture is worth a thousand words, but the emotion of a person caught on film can maybe tell a story.  Cameras can show daily walks in life, but it will never tell a story unless it is scripted to. 

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