The Melbourne Flâneur

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‘From this epoch derive the arcades and intérieurs, the exhibition halls and panoramas. They are residues of a dream world.’

— Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (p. 13)

Sydney’s Queen Victoria Building is a bizarre Byzantine bazaar, a constantinopolean cathedral consecrated to commerce in the grand nineteenth century tradition.  Through the great rounded arches of its windows at dusk, it gives the flâneur a fortuitous glimpse of a world of light and colour, like a movie painted in the monochromatic darkness of a cinema…

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Nearly five years in the making, the third instalment in a very irregular series of video essays examines Luis Buñuel’s controversial Spanish film Viridiana. Winner of the Palme d’Or at the 1961 Festival de Cannes, it would become a massive international hit—and a massive embarrassment to the Franco régime which commissioned it…

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‘… [T]he writer-dandy and by extension the director-dandy are arguably in a privileged position as they can apply their ideals to the limitless realm of fiction. The latter even has the potential to fulfil the depressive’s ultimate dream, the creation of a hermetic, artificial and complete world in accordance with his own highly individual ideal of beauty, his specific tastes.’ — Philip Mann, The Dandy at Dusk: Taste and Melancholy in the Twentieth Century.