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Film Screening and Reception: Judith Wechsler, 'The Passages of Walter Benjamin'

Reception with filmmaker Judith Wechsler: 5:30 p.m.
Film screening: 6:30 p.m., followed by Q&A

In 1933, Walter Benjamin, one of the most brilliant literary and cultural critics of his time, fled Berlin for Paris. There he sat, at the Bibliothèque Nationale, working in poverty and relative obscurity on his most important project, "The Arcades Project."

With the backdrop of totalitarianism spreading across the European continent, Benjamin explored the origins of modernity. What Benjamin sought was "images, not stories."

"The Passages of Walter Benjamin" (2014) by Judith Wechsler presents the "The Arcades Project" in the context of Benjamin's life and times, and eventual suicide. Told through Benjamin's own writings, fragments from his life and work are points of entry into his wider biography.