Benjamin, Cinema and Experience: "The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology"

stand in front of ourselves, the way we might have stood somewhere in a prehistoric past, but never before our waking gaze. Yet these images, developed in the darkroom of the lived moment, are the most important we will ever see. One might say that our most profound moments have been equipped -like those cigarette packs -with a little image, a photograph of ourselves. And that whole life which, as they say, passes through people's minds when they are dying or in mortal danger is composed of such little images. They flash by in as rapid a sequence as the booklets of our childhood, precursors of the cinema, in which we admired a boxer, a swimmer or a tennis player. [A Short Speech on Proust, delivered by Benjamin on his fortieth birthday, 1932]