Quote

By close-ups of the things around us, by focusing on hidden details of familiar objects, by exploring commonplace milieus under the ingenious guidance of the camera, the film, on the one hand, extends our comprehension of the necessities which rule our lives on the other hand, it manages to assure us of an immense and unexpected field of action.

Walter Benjamin

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Walter Benjamin
Age: 48 †
Born: 1892
Born: July 15
Died: 1940
Died: September 26
Art Critic
Essayist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Philosopher
Sociologist
Translator
Writer
Berlin
Germany
Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin
Action
Details
Immense
Extends
Film
Field
Guidance
Necessities
Hands
Rule
Unexpected
Ingenious
Around
Fields
Hidden
Assure
Things
Close
Camera
Comprehension
Objects
Manage
Focusing
Hand
Cameras
Commonplace
Lives
Familiar
Exploring
Manages

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What we must demand from the photographer is the ability to put such a caption beneath his picture as will rescue it from the ravages of modishness and confer upon it a revolutionary use value.
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Every image of the past that is not recognised by the present as one of its own threatens to disappear irretrievably.
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The Messiah comes not only as the redeemer, he comes as the subduer of Antichrist. Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.
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Ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him it is he who lives in them.
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As Hegel put it, only when it is dark does the owl of Minerva begin its flight. Only in extinction is the collector comprehend.
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The present, which, as a model of Messianic time, comprises the entire history of mankind in an enormous abridgment, coincides with the stature which the history of mankind has in the universe.
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The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed.
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All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war.
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Experience has taught me that the shallowest of communist platitudes contains more of a hierarchy of meaning than contemporary bourgeois profundity.
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We collect books in the belief that we are preserving them when in fact it is the books that preserve their collector.
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History breaks down into images, not into stories.
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Like ultraviolet rays memory shows to each man in the book of life a script that invisibly and prophetically glosses the text.
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The crowd is the veil through which the familiar city beckons to the flâneur as phantasmagoria-now a landscape, now a room.
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Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories.
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If sleep is the apogee of physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation. Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience.
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All disgust is originally disgust at touching.
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Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars [translated from Trauerspiel, 1928].
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For every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.
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If mythic violence is lawmaking, divine violence is law-destroying if the former sets boundaries, the latter boundlessly destroys them if mythic violence brings at once guilt and retribution, divine power only expiates if the former threatens, the latter strikes if the former is bloody, the latter is lethal without spilling blood
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The idea that happiness could have a share in beauty would be too much of a good thing.
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