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One Way Street: Fragments for Walter Benjamin (1992)

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clip Against narrative

Original classification rating: G. This clip chosen to be G

Clip description

Academic Michael Jennings discusses Benjamin’s ideas about narrative in the context of the Weimar Republic of the 1920s and early ‘30s. This is juxtaposed with early ‘90s street scenes from a newly unified Berlin, including the partly destroyed Berlin Wall.

Curator’s notes

by Kate Matthews

This sequence places Benjamin’s narrative theories in context with two moments in history. The juxtaposed interview and street footage suggest that Benjamin’s theories are salient to the new Berlin and the rubble of the Wall, as well as the Weimar Republic and the rubble of the First World War. It also provides an example of the way in which Benjamin’s concepts inform Hughes’s approach to the form of his film.

Benjamin’s ideas around narrative are interesting in the context of experimental filmmaking, which has its own history of reaction to dominant narrative forms. A number of experimental and political filmmaking movements, such as the French New Wave in the 1960s and feminist filmmaking in the 1970s, have associated linear narrative, continuity editing and ‘seamlessness’ with oppressive ideologies.

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