2 documents
# 116
A Cultural Genealogy of The Glass House: Reading Eisenstein with Benjamin
Soo Hwan Kim
1.
Why did Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) and Sergei Eisenstein (1898–1948) never meet? 1 It may seem like an odd question, but there’s a reason behind asking such a thing. Benjamin visited Moscow in the winter of 1926 and stayed for two months. He didn’t see Eisenstein, but did get to see his “old teacher” Vsevolod Meyerhold.
At least three other people were critical links in the chain that connected these two outstanding figures who shared an ideology and orientation during a…
e-flux Journal
Posted: March 4, 2021
Category
Film, Literature, Theater, Architecture
Subjects
History, Knowledge Production, Experimental Film, Russia, Germany, Bauhaus, Soviet Union
# 104
Sergei Tretyakov Revisited: The Cases of Walter Benjamin and Hito Steyerl
Soo Hwan Kim
A kind of chain has thus emerged, stretching from Tretyakov to Benjamin to Steyerl. Perhaps we could say that Steyerl, by combining Tretyakov and Benjamin’s ideas in her own way, has restored not so much Tretyakov himself as the Tretyakov who made such a decisive impact on Benjamin’s famous lecture. Theodor Adorno once noted that when Benjamin wrote “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” he had wanted to outdo Brecht. If this is true, then perhaps the person who helped him outdo Brecht was Brecht’s Russian friend Sergei Tretyakov.
e-flux Journal
Posted: November 7, 2019
Category
Avant-Garde, Contemporary Art, Philosophy, Labor & Work, Image
Subjects
Factography, Immaterial Labor