Australian
Screen

Clip description

Moments from Walter Benjamin’s last days are re-enacted, alongside contemporary scenes of Berlin and an interview with academic Michael Jennings on the way in which Benjamin’s ideas are used.

Curator’s notes

Hughes collects fragments, including re-enactments, readings from Benjamin’s works, text, graphic elements, interviews and scenes from the present, to build a consciously incomplete image of Benjamin and his work. The interview with Michael Jennings suggests how appropriate this approach is to a study of Benjamin. Jennings’s comments on Benjamin’s use of quotation enlighten the viewer on Hughes’s own use of quotation in the film. One example is Hughes’s deployment of René Clair’s 1924 dadaist film Entr’acte in One Way Street’s opening title sequence. In Clair’s film, men and women in formal attire chase an out-of-control hearse, their movement absurdly exaggerated and in slow motion. The film’s inclusion is, says Hughes, an ‘ironic comment on the biopic’s inevitable task of chasing the dead philosopher, particularly Benjamin, with the tragic and often romanticised circumstances of his death’.

One Way Street is in part an experimental take on the biopic. Hughes was interested in deconstructing the tradition of dramatic re-enactment common to this genre. He developed the re-enactment scenes collaboratively with performers. While they play with genre and narrative conventions, these scenes are also infused with sadness, as is the film, given the tragic trajectory of Benjamin’s life and death in the face of Nazism.