Adam Kossoff – Through The Bloody Mists Of Time

On the eve of World War II, did Humphrey Jennings make a film about the 1937 Paris Exposition? Walter Benjamin seems to think so. Jennings, British filmmaker and Surrealist, and Benjamin, Marxist philosopher, were both in Paris in 1937, and while they didn't meet, taking on angelic form some years later, they both meet on a perch on the sky. Focusing on their two great unfinished words, Jennings’s Pandaemonium and Benjamin’s The Arcades Project, the fragmented, aphoristic aesthetic of these two works, the images and the sound track are montaged together. As Jennings and Benjamin watch the film of the Paris Exposition go by in slow motion they converse; jousting and gossiping, exposing differences between British and European positions. All this has been recorded and narrated by an anonymous scribe. Their views on Modernism, Surrealism, history and progress, technology, capitalism as spectacle, and the consequences of a divided Europe, are up for grabs.