In reference, no doubt, to Descartes's whirlpools, ie. an idiosyncratic theory. In this context, a vision that cannot exist other than in this film (wait... isn't this all movies???) I've seen the term translated as "vortices," (both are used in the link below) but whirlpool is closer to Descarte's pre-Newtonian idea of a fluid universe. It's the term usually used...

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Note added at 9 hrs 4 mins (2005-08-13 23:57:39 GMT)
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In response to emiledgar\'s note: a proper name used as an adjective is not capitalized in French. It is Walter Benjamin (pronounce, I am told, Ben-ya-min).

oh!... just checked, and it turns out that this term IS one of Benjamin\'s own theories on time (from a paper on the following site: http://www.lib.latrobe.edu.au/AHR/archive/Issue-June-2000/in...

\"In another essay, Benjamin presented time as a whirlpool, \"in which earlier and later events, the prehistory and posthistory of an event swirl\". Of Proust\'s À la recherche du temps perdu, with its combination of aging and remembrance, he spoke of time as a braid, an intertwining. In Julien Green, he noted how the work would suddenly fall, in its treatment of family history, into the deep recesses of primal history, as if a corridor had suddenly opened in time. Of Hofmannsthal he wrote: \"The country no longer had a future. And so…the time that was yet to come was, as it were, all rolled up into the past, like a scroll, and became a sort of underworld of the future, one haunted by only the oldest of things.\"

Guess Benjamin echoed Descartes\'s term...


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Note added at 11 hrs 21 mins (2005-08-14 02:14:48 GMT)
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guess that if the author had meant to say what I proposed at first, he/she would have written: \"un tourbillon de Benjamin,\" with a slight derogatory tone. Still think that Benjamin was thinking of Descartes when he came up with the term. Although... one would have to verify with the original German term and the German translation of Descartes\'s term...