Flora Natapoff - An American Painter

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."

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.