hrvatski

Tamno srce grada i (de)evolucija flâneura

The here presented research focuses on the development of the flâneur figure within the 19th century and contemporary horror genre narratives. Initially conceptualized as a passive and disinterested observer of city streets, immersed in and intoxicated with the rich experience of life surrounding him on all sides, the flâneur fails to maintain his dispassionate poise and inevitably enters into interaction with both the city and people around him. This interaction is intrinsically linked with the expanding urbanization and the related processes of commercialization and commodification and, as this paper purports to show, it leads to the conceptualization of the flâneur as an aggressive stroller in those narratives pertaining to horror genre. In establishing the significance of the flâneur for the empirical and theoretical considerations of urban spaces which, as the 19th century nears its end, experience unprecedented growth and modernization, both Charles Baudelaire and subsequently Walter Benjamin use Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Man of the Crowd” as a starting point. This article examines the ways in which Poe’s two prototypical flâneur figures already reveal the threatening potential for the further development of the aggressive stroller. Using Poe’s short story as the analytical parameter, the article moves on to a more relevant analysis of Ryûhei Kitamura's 2008 film The Midnight Meat Train. The analysis of the two narratives in question is carried out within the theoretical framework of human geography and based on the seminal works of authors such as Yi-Fu Tuan and Peter Ackroyd. Their somewhat ominous and gloomy representation of urban experience provides an adequate background for critical considerations of the evolution of the flâneur towards an aggressive figure. Conclusively, the analysis shows that Kitamura’s contemporary narrative, while firmly grounded in the traditional conceptualizations of the flâneur and featuring, similarly to Poe’s text, two typical stroller figures, marks a more radical and definite departure from the standardized notion of the indifferent stroller and presents the aggressive flâneur as the sole figure which can survive on the streets of contemporary metropolises.

The Midnight Meat Train ; flâneur ; grad ; Walter Benjamin

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