2.2. Classics: Walter Benjamin and Fritz Lang's Metropolis

Walter Benjamin: Some Motifs in Baudelaire

To a Passer-By

The street about me roared with a deafening sound.
Tall, slender, in heavy mourning, majestic grief,
A woman passed, with a glittering hand
Raising, swinging the hem and flounces of her skirt;

Agile and graceful, her leg was like a statue's.
Tense as in a delirium, I drank
From her eyes, pale sky where tempests germinate,
The sweetness that enthralls and the pleasure that kills.

A lightning flash... then night! Fleeting beauty
By whose glance I was suddenly reborn,
Will I see you no more before eternity?


Elsewhere, far, far from here! too late! never perhaps!
For I know not where you fled, you know not where I go,
O you whom I would have loved, O you who knew it!

Baudrillard

In the sonnet - says Benjamin - the crowd is nowhere mentioned. Yet the poem is possible only against a big-city crowd, like the wind in the sails of a boat. And this big-city crowd is the protagonist and subject of Benjamin's essay. He discusses the dynamics of experience when living in a big city is the norm; and the kind of poetry this could call for. He talks of shocks and our experiences of time, the loss of aura and all kinds of haloes. "Of all the experiences which made his life what it was, Baudelaire singled out his having been jostled by the crowd as the decisive, unique experience."

And then Lang's Metropolis - the dystopian future with a social-democratic happy ending...