«  We ask of those who will come after us not gratitude for our victories, but the remembrance of our defeats. This is a consolation - the only consolation afforded to those who no longer have any hope of being consoled. »

 

 

                          Walter Benjamin, preparatory notes for «  On the Concept of History  »

 

 

 

                                                                                                       

 

Foreword to the film:

 

 

His unique combination of poetic imagination and analytical investigation makes Walter Benjamin one of the most remarkable thinkers of the 20th century.

 

His lifetime coincided with a period of great turbulence and dramatic change in all fields of life, feeding a wide range of research subjects: theory of history, of politics, of art, and of literature.

 

Walter Benjamin described himself as « a contradictory and mobile whole ».

 

In order to invite the spectator through a  personal journey into the life and work of Walter Benjamin, I choose to apply a fragmentary method, however, one that is dynamique and restless at the same time, and one that tends to interlace his life, some of his writings and the criticisms of three of his peers.

 

As to the narrative process, it is organized around a temporal discontinuum:  with the past being concentrated in the present moment of remembrance and pointing to the future,  between dreams, facts and testimonies intertwined.

 

The first image of the film is of a marionette sitting on a mountain. The night preceding his death, his life flits before the eyes of Walter Benjamin. Like front of a man who is condemned to death.

Looking down from the mountain onto a road that splits the sea in two, his gaze takes him on a journey to the nocturnal streets of the Berlin of his childhood, as well as through the parisien arcades of his adult life.

 

We follow him all the way during this wandering, which will be illustrated by dreamlike reenactments from the events of his life. These consecutive flashbacks will slowly give us some of the clues to the life and work of Walter Benjamin.

 

The re-enactments of these bygone events from Benjamin’s point of view will be interrupted by the appearances of Hannah Arendt, Gershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno, who all knew him personally and will in turn talk about Benjamin. 

 

The marionettes of Hannah Arendt, ( political theorist and his ally of exile in France) Theodor W. Adorno (philosopher and his first and only disciple), and Gershom Scholem (historien of the Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism, and his longtime, devoted friend) will appear as the imaginary interviewees of the film.

The story they tell is based on the texts they wrote about Benjamin. In turn they help to draw a portrait of some of the main motifs of Benjamin’s unique configuration of theory together with his idiosyncrasies, his decisions and his failures. A playful reference to the long tradition of interviews in documentary film.

 

In addition to the commentaries about his life and work by these three witnesses, a virtual life will pass before the eyes of Benjamin, in form of 12 images. Images of a potential life that could have been, where things could have turned out to be different, if only.

 

These 12 images will appear front of him, and front of the spectator of the film, in the set of the Kaiserpanorama ( The Imperial Panorama ). This pre-cinematic device from the 19th century that projects stereoscopic images in a circular motion, fascinated Benjamin as a child and he later examined it in several of his writings.

 

One of these writings is « The Second Self, a Sylvester night story, offered for reflexion… » will be staged here, appearing as a film in the film. In this tale, Benjamin ends up meeting his «  Second Self », the one that could have saved him from himself. Projected by the machine, his image flits by, before passing onto the next one, from this eventual but never materialised life.

 

Since all the protagonists of the film are deceased, they will be represented by their marionettes. The marionettes will make the missing and long gone accessible to the audience. With this « effect of contemporaneity » that no archive images can provide, the public will be able to immerse in the world of Walter Benjamin, who thus becomes current affairs.