It was 24 January 1926. Walter Benjamin had been in Moscow for over a month before he managed to fulfil one of the objectives that had first motivated his trip to the new Soviet capital: to watch Sergei M. Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin (Bronenosets Potemkin, 1925). Willy Haas, the editor of Die literarische Welt and a prominent film critic, had commissioned Benjamin to write a rejoinder to an article critical of Battleship Potemkin, written by the playwright and novelist Oscar A. H. Schmitz. Perhaps spurred on by Benjamin's trip to Moscow—which had been, in turn, partially financed by Martin Buber as an advance for the article he committed to write for Die Kreatur—Haas had planned to devote a special issue of Die literarische Welt to the culture of the ‘New Russia’, which would eventually include three of Benjamin's articles. Film was to play a central role in the issue. Haas would write a review of Vsevolod Pudovkin's Mother (Mat, 1926) and Benjamin, apart from his reply to Schmitz, would write an overview of Soviet cinema. After a long wait, Benjamin spent five hours in a small screening room in the company of only a translator. The programme consisted of three films: Mother, Battleship Potemkin, and Yakov Protazanov's detective comedy The Trial of the Three Million (Protsess o tryokh millionakh, 1926). Benjamin was exhausted, leaving the room before the third film ended. The last film, a comic thriller based on a play by Italian author Umberto Notari, starred Igor Ilyinsky, an actor he had seen a few days prior, in a film he detested. Benjamin, in fact, had attempted to watch Battleship Potemkin weeks earlier, on 16 December. However, when he arrived in the room in which it was being screened, the film was entering the final act. Benjamin did not enjoy watching Potemkin for the second time. In his diary, he recorded that it had been ‘an exhausting, unpleasant day in every respect’, describing it as ‘quite a chore sitting through that many films in succession with no musical accompaniment’. Benjamin wrote his fierce critique of Schmitz's article two days later, on the evening of 26 January, when he was in decidedly better spirits. The result was a sarcastic text in which he portraits Schmitz as a bourgeois intellectual who is not able to discuss the film either from a cinematic or a political standpoint.