Judith Wechsler

Judith Wechsler

N/A

Most Known for...

Movie Picture

The Passages of Walter Benjamin 2014

Walter Benjamin was a leading German Jewish cultural historian. His Arcades Project, a monumental study of nineteenth century Paris, is set in the context of his life and times. His friendships with Brecht, Scholem, Arendt and Adorno and his romances are evoked. Drawing on correspondence and quotations from 'The Arcades Project,' the film is a visual evocation of Benjamin's great incomplete study. The film includes photographs, documents, letters and manuscripts from the Benjamin archives in Berlin and Jerusalem, prints and photographs from the Bibliotheque national in Paris, interviews with leading Benjamin scholars and archival film of Paris and Berlin in the 1920s and 1930s.
Movie Picture

Svetlana Boym: Exile and Imagination N/A

This documentary film is about the life and work of Svetlana Boym, literary and cultural critic, media artist, novelist and playwright. In 1980, age 21, Svetlana left the USSR for the US, unable to pursue studies at the Leningrad university because of the Jewish quota. After graduate studies at Boston University and Harvard, she became the Professor of Slavic and Comparative Literature at Harvard. A brilliant writer of ambitious scope and great imagination, combining personal memoir with philosophical essay and historical analysis, she explored motifs of exile, nostalgia, the diasporic imagination and different forms of freedom in Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Nabokov, Mandelstahm, Akhmatova, Brodsky, and many others, in a total of six books, with two more about to appear.
Movie Picture

Jasper Johns: Take an Object 1990 (1)

A portrait of the artist at work. The film begins in 1972 with Johns repainting Air Ocean World based on Buckminster Fuller's dymaxion map. Johns work is traced over the next eighteen years. His Untitled, 1973, with its cross-hatching, flagstones, and anatomical parts become recurrent motifs, as Johns begins to imbed skulls and severed arms in them. The paintings become more personal as Johns gradually "drops the reserve" in his recent series, "The Seasons." The film culminates with Johns working on the final state of the etching based on "The Seasons."