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Clip description

The filmmaker visits Paris, firstly on a tourist barge on the Seine, then exploring its old shopping arcades. Meanwhile, academic and author Susan Buck-Morss describes Benjamin’s masterwork, Das Passagen Werk (1927–40), or The Arcades Project, that was built around a metaphor of the Paris arcades.

Curator’s notes

Benjamin’s The Arcades Project uses the Paris arcades as a microcosm of late 19th and early 20th century urban culture and modernity. Benjamin also models the work’s non-linear structure on the arcade’s physical layout. Here Hughes furnishes Benjamin’s metaphor with concrete images of the arcades as they appear in contemporary form. His views of the Eiffel Tower, coupled with an audio tour and its simultaneous translation into multiple languages, also resonate with Benjamin’s ideas about mass culture, Paris as 'the capital of the nineteenth century’ with its iron construction work, and the image.

The Arcades Project was Benjamin’s final, incomplete epic work and remained undiscovered for a long period after his death. It was first published in Germany in 1982 and a full English translation did not appear until 1999, seven years after One Way Street was released. Susan Buck-Morss’s critical analysis, in her The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project, came out in 1989. Before this, the considerable impact of those essays of Benjamin’s that had been translated was visible in their quotation by figures like US writer Susan Sontag and US performance artist Laurie Anderson in her 'The dream before (for Walter Benjamin)’ from the Strange Angels CD (1989), which opens and closes One Way Street’s soundtrack.