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Ordnance, Five Hats And Constantinople: Benjamin, Gustafsson And Lubitsch, Jon Cockburn

Faculty of Creative Arts - Papers (Archive)

This paper concentrates on identifying intellectual, cinematic and commercial representations of the efficiency movement as embodied in the emergent mechanical-flâneuse (the term is an obvious combination of the adjective ‘mechanical’, as a Taylorist/Fordist signifier, with the noun ‘flâneuse’, which is a gender inversion of the masculine flâneur: the metropolitan wanderer profiled in Benjamin’s re-examination of Baudelaire and 19th century Paris). To articulate these representations of the ‘new’ woman, under the influence of Americanism in post-1918 Europe, this paper focuses on two passages in Benjamin’s One Way Street. Benjamin’s passages are then read in juxtaposition to advertisements, the first for hats …