Outtakes of a Life: On a Cinematographic Moment in Benjamin's "The Storyteller"

"Suddenly my whole life passed before my eyes." Scientific interest in the "life review experience" or LRE, as it is now called, may be traced to the beginning of the twentieth century and have its origins, as Kittler suggests, in the invention of film. Aware of this interest, Benjamin gives the notion of the LRE a novel twist in his 1936 essay, "The Storyteller." According to him, what is set in motion inside a man as his life comes to an end are "views of himself…under which he has encountered himself without being aware of it." What interests him, in short, is less life as it was once lived, remembered, and screened at the moment of death than in "outtakes" from it, moments that are "unforgettable" precisely (and paradoxically) to the extent that will never have been part of one's life story. Suddenly emerging in the dying man's looks and expressions, the "unforgettable," he says, imparts to everything that concerns him a certain authority. The essay examines the nature of this authority and its association with moments that are unconsciously recorded, obliviously archived, and unwittingly transmitted.