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Walter Benjamin knew what Timothée Chalamet meant about opera and ballet
When production shots of Timothée Chalamet in Marty Supreme first graced the internet, one wag, taking note of the glasses, mustache and sweater vest, had an alternate project in mind.
“First look at Timothée Chalamet on SPIRITU MUNDI,” the post went, “a Walter Benjamin biopic focusing on his personal entanglements with other notable figures.”
The resemblance was there, but after an 11th-hour scandal in the leadup to Chalamet’s could-be Oscar win, it could be more than skin deep. The remark that got Chalamet in trouble came during a CNN and Variety-hosted conversation between the Dune star and pensive Lincoln pitchman Matthew McConaughey.
“I don’t want to be working in ballet or opera or things where it’s like ‘keep this thing alive’ when nobody cares about this anymore,” Chalamet said before kinda (sorta) backtracking.
The reprisals from the fine arts were swift. The Seattle Opera introduced the promo code “TIMOTHEE” for discounted seats to their production of Carmen. Ballet dancers called him out on the gram. But Chalamet’s comments, even without accounting for his own family’s connection to the New York City Ballet, are more nuanced in context. And that brings us back to Benjamin.
Chalamet was discussing the need to keep the cinema experience alive, and offered that Generation Z may be the future, citing an article that they now outnumber millennial moviegoers. What he may have meant to convey, though he couldn’t quite articulate it, was the utility of film as a populist art form, as opposed to the mediums of ballet and opera, which have a higher barrier to entry.
In Benjamin’s 1935 essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, he makes the argument that film in particular excels at something works like paintings can’t do: “Meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation.”
With film being accessible, not ephemeral or reduced to a singular, rarefied artifact with a cult-like “aura,” the result is a “tremendous shattering of tradition which is the obverse of the contemporary crisis and renewal of mankind.”
Benjamin thought that when the ritualistic was stripped from a work of art, it could be used for political ends. Filmgoing was part of a progressive mass movement and led to “apperception,” synthesizing new ideas and experiences into existing ones, via distraction (zerstreuung in the German). It was, to him, with its reliance on montage, an ideal vehicle for a fractured age.
It’s interesting to consider this theory in an era of smartphones and at-home streaming. These are the newest incarnations of mass availability. In a sense, Chalamet’s argument is retrograde, wanting to preserve something outmoded and at risk of the same obsolescence as ballet and opera (recall how the Met Opera, just east of Chalamet’s old stomping grounds at LaGuardia High, has proposed selling its Chagalls to stay liquid; meanwhile they beam their offerings to movie theaters).
The nature of cinema has shifted, and the present cultic significance of an IMAX 70 mm run of something like Oppenheimer would seem to capture a new aura Benjamin didn’t anticipate. But then, Benjamin was a man of contradictions himself. He was sad at the loss of aura even as he celebrated the possibility of photography and film and had his own widest reach on the radio.
The Zoomers Chalamet is speaking of include the kids who dressed up in suits in a phenomenon called “Gentleminions” to see a screening of a Despicable Me spinoff film. They and the legions who came to The Minecraft Movie to scream at the phrase “chicken jockey” could rightly be said to be acting ritualistically, but it is of course collective, and the beleaguered movie theater employees who had to sweep up the deluge of popcorn could tell you these audiences were almost certainly distracted.
“The film makes the cult value recede into the background not only by putting the public in the position of the critic, but also by the fact that at the movies this position requires no attention,” Benjamin wrote.
I should note that Chalamet got onto his opera and ballet tangent to begin with after McConaughey asked him if audiences today have a more limited attention span.
Chalamet seemed to bring up the surge in Gen Z attendance as a counterpoint, but the two are hardly mutually exclusive. You can still go to the movies and be, what Benjamin called, “an examiner, but an absent-minded one.”
Certainly this absent-mindedness is possible at the ballet and the opera — I direct you to the program origami from Citizen Kane. Benjamin was discussing static paintings like Picassos, and nothing so Dionysian as those live mediums. But they are not mass-produced and are more inaccessible now than in 1935, when they were still popular entertainment.
Film continues to have the ultimate edge in an age of distraction, both for creating something communal and prompting movement forward. It’s by now no means the most popular way to get a message out into the world, but the very uproar at Chalamet’s comments are a proof that film still matters.
As The New York Times’ dance critic Gia Kourlas acknowledged, “If a dancer said that a film didn’t matter, it would be like a tree falling in the woods.”
But enough of all this fuss. Give us the Chalamet Benjamin biopic, and let that angel of history be the new “chicken jockey.”
The post Walter Benjamin knew what Timothée Chalamet meant about opera and ballet appeared first on The Forward.
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French Jewish Girl Assaulted Near Paris, Adolescents Arrested for Antisemitic Attack
Sign reading “+1000% of Antisemitic Acts: These Are Not Just Numbers” during a march against antisemitism, in Lyon, France, June 25, 2024. Photo: Romain Costaseca / Hans Lucas via Reuters Connect
Three teenage boys assaulted a 14-year-old Jewish girl and threatened to kill her in the Parisian suburb of Sarcelles on Friday, police said, resulting in a trip to the hospital for the victim and arrests for two of the 12-year-old suspects.
The incident began when three younger boys approached an older teenage girl to ask why she failed to observe Ramadan, according to local media reports. After she disclosed her Jewish identity, the three reportedly began calling her a “dirty Jew” and one threatened, “I’ll kill you on the Koran.” They then allegedly beat her, especially on her face.
The assault required a trip to the emergency room, where hospital staff described her as in a state of shock.
Paris law enforcement arrested two suspects that evening and seek to identify the third.
Another suburb of Paris also saw an antisemitic incident on Sunday when vandals hit a Kosher restaurant in Levallois-Perret, spray-painting “dirty Jew” in red across the building’s windows.
A kosher restaurant in Levallois-Perret, near Paris vandalized with antisemitic graffiti reading “Dirty Jew.” Photo: Screenshot
Antisemitic vandals hit Kokoriko, another Kosher restaurant in Paris, just two weeks earlier. Investigators say the criminals sprayed acid on tables, walls, and the floor, rendering silverware and plates unusable.
That attack came just days after the French Interior Ministry last month released its annual report on anti-religious acts, revealing a troubling rise in antisemitic incidents documented in a joint dataset compiled with the Jewish Community Protection Service.
Antisemitism in France remained at alarmingly high levels last year, with 1,320 incidents recorded nationwide, as Jews and Israelis faced several targeted attacks, according to the data.
Although the total number of antisemitic outrages in 2025 fell by 16 percent compared to 2024’s second highest ever total of 1,570 cases, the newly released report warned that antisemitism remained “historically high,” with more than 3.5 attacks occurring every day.
Even though Jews make up less than 1 percent of France’s population, they accounted for 53 percent of all religiously motivated crimes last year.
Between 2022 and 2025, antisemitic attacks across France quadrupled.
The most recent figure of total antisemitic incidents represents a 21 percent decline from 2023’s record high of 1,676 incidents, but a 203 percent increase from the 436 antisemitic acts recorded in 2022, before the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel.
The surge in antisemitism appears to have carried into this year. Last month, a 13-year-old boy on his way to synagogue in Paris was brutally beaten by a knife-wielding assailant.
“How do you find the words to explain to a 13-year-old child that he is being attacked because he is Jewish? Who will be able to restore his confidence in the future tomorrow?” Yonathan Arfi, president of the Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions (CRIF), said of the incident.
One-third of last year’s antisemitic incidents in France explicitly referencing Palestine or the war in Gaza, indicting that anti-Israel rhetoric is fueling antisemitism.
The prominence of anti-Zionist forms of antisemitism has prompted French leaders to propose legislation combating this type of hate, as announced by French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu last month at CRIF’s annual gathering,
“To define oneself as anti-Zionist is to question Israel’s right to exist. It’s a call for the destruction of an entire people under the guise of ideology,” Lecornu said, announcing that the government would introduce a bill to criminalize anti-Zionism. “There is a difference between legitimate criticism of the Israeli government and rejecting the very existence of the Jewish state. This ‘blurring’ must stop.”
Lecornu declared that “hatred of Jews is hatred of the Republic and a stain on France.”
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Belgian Synagogue Damaged in Blast Considered Antisemitic Attack
Police secure the site of a synagogue damaged by an explosion early on Monday, in Liege, Belgium, March 9, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Yves Herman
An explosion hit a synagogue in the Belgian city of Liege early on Monday in what authorities said was an antisemitic attack that caused damage but no injuries.
The explosion, which happened around 4 am (0300 GMT), blew out the windows of the synagogue, as well as those of a building on the opposite side of the road, public broadcaster RTBF said.
The cause was not clear, but prosecutors said the case had been passed to federal authorities, which normally investigate incidents linked to terrorism or organized crime.
Belgian Interior Minister Bernard Quintin called the explosion “a despicable antisemitic act that directly targeted the Jewish community of Belgium.”
He said security measures around similar sites will continue to be reinforced.
Eitan Bergman, Vice-President of the Coordinating Committee of Jewish Organizations in Belgium (CCOJB), said the targeting of the synagogue was deeply shocking.
“Liege is home to a very small but vibrant Jewish community where I personally grew up. Today, the feelings among our community members are a mixture of sadness, worry and profound shock,” he told Reuters.
Police have cordoned off the largely residential street on the bank of the river Meuse opposite Liege city center.
Federal prosecutors declined to give further details of the incident.
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Much of Iran’s Near-Bomb-Grade Uranium Likely to Be in Isfahan, IAEA’s Grossi Says
A satellite image shows a closer view of the destroyed tunnel entrances at Isfahan missile complex after reported airstrikes, amid the US-Israeli conflict with Iran, in Isfahan, Isfahan Province, Iran, March 8, 2026. Photo: Vantor/Handout via REUTERS
Almost half of Iran’s uranium enriched to up to 60% purity, a short step from weapons-grade, was stored in a tunnel complex at Isfahan and is probably still there, UN nuclear watchdog chief Rafael Grossi said on Monday.
The tunnel complex is the only target that appears not to have been badly damaged in attacks last June by Israel and the US on Iran’s nuclear facilities.
Diplomats have long said Isfahan has been used to store 60% uranium, which the International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed in a report to member states last month, without saying how much was there.
IRAN STILL HAS HIGHLY ENRICHED URANIUM STOCKS
The IAEA estimates that when Israel launched its first attacks in June, Iran had 440.9 kg of 60% uranium. If enriched further, that would provide the explosive needed for 10 nuclear weapons, according to an IAEA yardstick.
“What we believe is that Isfahan had until our last inspection a bit more than 200 kg, maybe a little bit more than that, of 60% uranium,” IAEA chief Rafael Grossi told reporters in Paris.
He said the stock was “mainly” at Isfahan, and some held elsewhere may have been destroyed.
“The widespread assumption is that the material is still there. So, we haven’t seen – and not only us, I think in general all those observing the facility through satellite imagery and other means to see what’s going on there – movement indicating that the material could have been transferred,” Grossi said.
Iran has not informed the IAEA of the status or whereabouts of its highly enriched uranium since the June attacks, nor has it let IAEA inspectors return to its bombed facilities.
Iran’s nuclear program is one reason Israel and the US have given for their current attacks on Iran, arguing that it was getting too close to being able to produce a bomb, despite Trump saying in June that US strikes had obliterated the program. The IAEA has said it has no credible indication of a coordinated nuclear weapons program.
All three Iranian uranium-enrichment plants known to have been operating – two at Natanz and one at Fordow – were destroyed or badly damaged in June.
“There is an amount [of 60% uranium] in Natanz also, which we believe is still there,” Grossi said.