Not to find one’s way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance – nothing more. But to lose oneself in a city – as one loses oneself in a forest – that calls for quite a different schooling.Then signboards and street names, passers-by, roofs, kiosks, or bars must speak to the wanderer like a cracking twig under his feet, like the startling call of a bittern in the distance, like the sudden stillness of a clearing with a lily standing erect at its centre. Paris taught me this art of straying.
— Walter Benjamin, A Berlin Chronicle
A perfect film accompaniment to this quote would be the extended Tokyo sequence in Chris Marker’s film Sans Soleil, where the writer of the letters is rendered a stray creature, a hyperreal voyeur who is made to sway: sway to the tunes of Tokyo traffic, the systemic machinery of crowds, privately public encounters like musical staircases and video-game parlours that open on to the street, patterns of facial expressions at ticket-booths, constructed histories of the swarm on the metro, gazing billboards, and the disconcerting mechanism of gaining anonymity by requesting it from the crowds; the last, by virtue of being a flâneur who forces himself into oblivion by letting technology flâneur for him.
I’ve been round the world several times and now only banality still interests me.
— the writer of the letters, as quoted in Sans Soleil
