A film screening followed by lecture and discussion with director Judith Wechsler and Susan Buck-Morss (The Graduate Center, CUNY).

THE PASSAGES OF WALTER BENJAMIN. A documentary film. 55 min. 2014.

The Paris Arcades, known as Passages in French, were a principal focus of renowned literary and cultural critic Walter Benjamin. From 1927-1940 he worked on his study: “My book, Paris Arcades, is the theater of all my struggles and all my ideas.” Benjamin’s Arcades Project is the focus of this one hour documentary, set in the context of his life and times. The film includes documents, manuscripts and letters from the Benjamin archives, albums of prints and photographs at the Bibliothèque Nationale, interviews with leading Benjamin scholars, and archival film of Paris and Berlin in the 1920s and ’30s.

Judith Wechsler is an art historian primarily of 19th century French art, who has engaged in interdisciplinary studies: the intersection of art and theater, art and film, caricature and physiognomy, art and science. Her book, A Human Comedy: Physiognomy and Caricature in 19th Century Paris, focuses on Daumier in a political and historical context. She has published articles and catalogue essays on Daumier including “Gender and Gesture in Daumier,” “Movement in the Drawings of Daumier: Still and Still Moving,” and two films on Daumier, “Daumier Paris and the Spectator,” directed with Charles Eames and “Daumier. One Must be of One’s Time,” made for the Daumier exhibition in Paris and broadcast in France and the US. Her books, The Interpretation of Cézanne and Cézanne in Perspective (ed and intro) have been widely used. More recently she has written on “Sensation and Perception in Cézanne.” Wechsler’s interest in drawing is evident in her 1999 book Le Cabinet des dessins. Daumier, and a film commissioned by the Louvre, “Dessiner, la main qui pense,” “Drawing the Thinking Hand“ (in its English version.)