Henry+Bond+Seminars

[|Henry Bond] 's seminars will take place between 10-12 on Thursdays 5th, 12th, 19th November at Flat Time House

Fade up to: A long-shot of an arid mountain; a whistling wind sound indicates "altitude"—the camera direction is in the style of the opening sequence of Pier Paolo Passolini's film of Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. A sequence of shots ("vignettes") describe the mountain: crumbly rocks; no snow; not too high. Cut to: a group of—what appears at-first-sight to be—ebullient hill walkers and hikers, taking a rest break. As we get closer (slow zoom) we see that this small group also includes some holding suitcases; now that we can see more clearly we can recognise that these men and women are actually a group of determined war-time refugees. The sun is setting and we pan slowly but decisively to their left: a man in a suit is sitting on a rock alone and he appears to be correcting a manuscript. Just before he places his sheaf of papers back into an attaché case we briefly glimpse the front-page title: Die Passagen Werk, and thus, what we had already guessed at now seems certain: this must be Walter Benjamin correcting his unfinished magnum opus during a break from his mountainside traverse down to Port Bou. A man from the main group approaches him: "Only these few papers you carry and nothing else?" "Yes," Walter replies, "I prefer to travel light!" He smiles just a little as he speaks that line but then turns and looks up—rupturing the fragile diegesis that has only just been established—he stares directly into the lens (would a recognizable "lens flare" be over-egging here?). His enquiring look meets the viewer's gaze: he hesitates, he cannot be sure if he sees "someone" ... No, can't be! He returns to the corrections, and we slowly zoom out—this moment is particularly poignant for those who already know that in a few hours from now Benjamin will sit on a shabby hotel bed and deliberately inhale a fatal dose of cyanide gas fumes. The next time that viewers of this biopic film will see him—actually in only a few seconds time—he will be four-and-a-half-years-old, leaping down the staircase of a grand Berlin townhouse...

Reading for seminar here.