John Hoffmann

How would a film look if Walter Benjamin had been behind the movie camera? Miriam Hansen entertains this possibility in Cinema and Experience (2012) when she speculates about an “imaginary city film” made according to Benjamin’s aesthetic principles. Such a film, Hansen writes, would include a variety of avant-garde techniques “from French Impressionism to Soviet experimental cinema, in particular montage (that is, discontinuous and rhythmic editing), nonconventional and expressive framing, and camera movement.” Yet Hansen’s version of a Benjaminian film practice is inferred almost entirely from Benjamin’s film theory, while his descriptive essays on European cities—“Naples,” “Marseilles,” and the focus of this article, “Moscow” (1927)—are missing from her authoritative survey of Benjamin’s thought. That “Moscow” is absent from Hansen’s analysis follows a tendency in Benjamin scholarship to treat the essay as a minor work, as either a methodological precedent for his landmark study of Paris, the Arcades Project or, worse, a byproduct of an autobiographical curiosity, the Moscow Diary (1986). This article brings “Moscow” to the fore and derives from this densely visual text a Benjaminian film practice grounded in his impressions of the Soviet capital. Rather than project Benjamin’s later film-theoretical claims onto his experience of the city, I argue that his depictions of daily life and cultural transformations underway in Moscow were decisive for his developing views on cinematic perception.