Flâneur III: Benjamin's Shadow

This film is first and foremost a poetic, passionate declaration of love for Paris: les passages, the Seine, the Jardin du Luxembourg, the Metro. Starting out from the German philosopher Walter Benjamin's Work of Passage the director has created an associative universe, a mosaic in which text fragments are incorporated in a close interplay with the symbol-laden spaces. With the director as a flâneur, moving around the city, hand in hand with the angel of history, knowledge of the clash of cultural history with the present is evoked. We meet modern Parisians, and on the sound track we hear Ulf Peter Hallberg's reflections on Benjamin's work.