“In his essay on the redemption of physical reality, Siegfried Kracauer asserts that
the street in the extended sense of the word is not only the arena of fleeting impressions and chance encounters but a place where the flow of life is bound to assert itself. Again one will have to think mainly of the city street with its ever-moving crowds. The kaleidoscopic sights mingle with unidentified shapes and fragmentary visual complexes and cancel each other out, thereby preventing the onlooker from following up any of the innumerable suggestions they offer. What appeals to him are not so much sharp-contoured individuals engaged in this or that definable pursuit as loose throngs of sketchy, completely indeterminate figures. Each has a story, yet the story is not given. Instead, an incessant flow casts its spell over the flâneur or even creates him. The flâneur is intoxicated with life in the street – life eternally dissolving the patterns which it is about to form. [1960: 72]”
https://filmstudiesforfree.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/the-flaneur-on-film-on-films-by-richard.html
sasha u // unité 15 // year5 