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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781841505916 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Intellect Books |
| Publication date: | 01/01/2011 |
| Series: | ISSN |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 132 |
| File size: | 6 MB |
About the Author
Marcelline Block is a lecturer in history at Princeton University, where she is completing her PhD in French. She is the editor or coeditor of several volumes, including Situating the Feminist Gaze and Spectatorship in Postwar Cinema.
Read an Excerpt
World Film Locations Paris
By Marcelline Block
Intellect Ltd
Copyright © 2011 Intellect LtdAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84150-591-6
CHAPTER 1
UPFRONT
PARIS
City of the Imagination
Text by KEITH READER
PARIS IS THE MOST visited city in the world and probably the most visually recognisable in Europe, on a global scale second only to New York. As the unquestioned hub of French cultural life, and the centre of Europe's most prolific and successful film industry, it unsurprisingly dominates cinematic representations of the country to an extent unequalled almost anywhere else. Only Marseille among other French cities, as in the works of Marcel Pagnol and more recently Robert Guédiguian, has a statistically significant presence. Yet, the monumental Paris beloved of tourists — the home of Notre-Dame and the Eiffel Tower — figures comparatively little in filmic representations. The characteristic Parisian cinematic vista is a street, boulevard or café scene, using the city as setting for working-class life, criminality and that quintessential Parisian activity, flânerie — strolling with no specific goal in mind, something to which the city's compactness compared to London or New York lends itself particularly well.
Such scenes were in the early days of cinema generally shot in the studio, and the work of the set designer thus played an important part. The émigré Hungarian Alexander Trauner is an emblematic figure here, responsible for the sets of Marcel Carné's 1938 Poetic Realist drama Hôtel du Nord and his 1830s-set theatre drama Les Enfants du Paradis/Children of Paradise (1945), as well as, almost fifty years later, Luc Besson's Subway (1985). René Clair used location shooting and trick photography to striking effect in his 1925 silent Paris qui dort/Paris Asleep (with a sequence set on the Eiffel Tower), but more characteristic of the romantic populist Paris of the 1930s are his studio-shot Sous les toits de Paris/Under the Roofs of Paris (1930) and 14 Juillet/Bastille Day (1933). Paris city life is overwhelmingly apartment — rather than house — based, and this structures Jean Renoir's 1936 Le crime de Monsieur Langp/The Crime of Monsieur Lange, perhaps the greatest pre-WW II representation of Paris working-class life, set around a courtyard which houses a publishing firm and a laundry as well as being home to many of its characters, whose personal and professional interactions intertwine to memorable effect.
Location shooting became the norm after the Second World War thanks to the availability of lighter equipment and the burgeoning of low-budget film-making, notably in the work of the New Wave directors. Éric Rohmer's Le signe du lion/The Sign of Leo (1962) takes place in a Paris deserted by its inhabitants, as the city often is, during a stifling August, while Jacques Rivette's 1961 Paris nous appartient — literally 'Paris belongs to us' — sets before us, despite its joyous title, a world of paranoia reminiscent of film noir, a genre more explicitly evoked in Jean-Luc Godard's 1960 À bout de souffle/Breathless. The city in these three films becomes more threatening, and in Godard's case more Americanised, than in much pre-WW II cinema; something connected with the loss or absence of a sense of neighbourhood in these films. This is by contrast strikingly present in François Truffaut's 1959 Les quatre cents coups/ The 400 Blows, set in a working-class area of inner Paris, though one less affectionately evoked than in Clair or Renoir.
The student Paris of the Left Bank figures in the cinema less often than we might expect. The events of May 1968 yielded no major film, though they form the historical backdrop to Jean Eustache's La maman et la putain/ The Mother and the Whore (1973) — a love triangle set in and around Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Specific cinematic evocation of this or that neighbourhood is comparatively rare, as though many films were set in a kind of generic Paris with no topographical anchoring. Leos Carax's Les amants du Pont-Neuf/ The Lovers on the Bridge (1991) may be set on the city's oldest bridge, but despite the dereliction of its two central characters, its picture of Paris is in many ways a romanticised one. One exception is Cedric Klapisch's 1996 Chacun cherche son chat/When the Cat's Away, a vivid location-shot portrayal of the Bastille area in the 1990s, a period in which it underwent substantial gentrification.
Cinematic Paris of the past few decades has become much more multi-ethnic, giving space to the city's beur population — born in France of North African immigrant parents — and to the increasingly truculent banlieues outside the city limits. Mathieu Kassovitz's La Haine/Hate (1995), whose three principal characters are respectively Arabic, black and Jewish, is the emblematic film of this genre, bodying forth what Jacques Chirac, elected President in that year, described as the 'fracture' of French society. Not all recent films set in multi-ethnic Paris, however, are as pessimistic and imbued with violence as La Haine or for instance Généstal's La Squale/ The Squale (2000), whose central character is a young female gang leader: Claire Denis in 2008 gave us 35 rhums/35 Shots of Rum, a tender evocation of the relationship between a train driver of black African descent and his daughter. French cinema today remains alert to the changes in the city which continues to dominate the life of the nation and to be in all probability, given its extraordinary number of cinemas, the filmic centre of the non-Hollywood universe.
BOUDU SAVED FROM DROWNING/BOUDU SAUVÉ DES EAUX(1932)
LOCATION
Pont des Arts, 1st/6th arrondissements
PROVIDING A PANORAMIC SURVEY of Paris circa 1932, Renoir's classic offers as comprehensive a picture of the French capital as the country's cinema has ever produced. It begins with relative tranquillity in the Bois de Boulogne on the western outskirts of the capital, which is presented as a space of leisure and a repository of bourgeois mannerisms wherein the titular tramp is disdainfully looked down upon. Here Boudu (Michel Simon) loses his dog and disturbs the peace before leaving for the heart of Paris on the bustling Quai Malaquais and the historic Pont des Arts — Paris's only pedestrian bridge and a refuge for the city's clochards. These locations, teeming with vibrant life and throbbing with people, offer an immediate contrast to the Bois de Boulogne, stressing another side of the city altogether by highlighting the centres of its intellectual, cultural and artistic life (the shots on the Quai take in the Institut de France and the Louvre across the Seine). These are disparate sites whose only link seems to be the anomalous presence of Boudu — something captured with groundbreaking, proto-vérité naturalism by Renoir's telephoto lens. Boudu's journey to the very centre of Paris, a return of the socially Renoir's telephoto lens. Boudu's journey to the very centre of Paris, a return of the socially repressed, thus comments directly on the city in its entirety. ->Adam Bingham
GUNMAN IN THE STREETS (1950)
LOCATION
Magasins Réunis, 136 Rue de Rennes, 6th arrondissement
FREED BY HIS GANG near the Palais de Justice, black marketeer Roback (Dane Clark) ducks into the Magasins Réunis at 136 Rue de Rennes. A single shot suggests the first of several narrow escapes from the dragnet closing in on him. He emerges from behind a display of children's furniture, exiting frame left just before the arrival of police cars outside, visible through the iron and glass wall of the store. As the police head for the nearest entrance, the camera tracks left following them. Suddenly it tilts down; our attention is redirected inside. A lone hanger swings on a rack of overcoats, an indexical trace of Roback's recently acquired disguise. This Franco-American co-production paired the American director of This Gun for Hire (1942) with cinematographer Eugen Schüfften, who had filmed documentaries, Kammerspielfilme, and expressionist blockbusters like Metropolis (Lang, 1927), before fleeing to France and then the United States in 1933. Visually, Gunman is all over the map, in terms of the city's geography and the way it is filmed. Night scenes shot with available light are interspersed with shots of sets whose wet pavement and looming streetlights recall Straßenfilme. The shot described above combines location shooting with the 'unchained camera' of 1920s German studio-bound cinema. This seemingly eclectic layering of styles creates a palimpsestic reminder of Paris' pivotal role in the transatlantic exchange of films and personnel that gave rise to film noir. Similarly, by 1950, 136 Rue de Rennes already had several layered façades. ->Dennis Hanlon
DON'T TOUCH THE LOOT!/TOUCHEZ PAS AU GRISBI (1954)
LOCATION
Rue Frochot, Pigalle, 9th arrondissement
JACQUES BECKER'STouchez pas au grisbi features aging underworld figure Max (Jean Gabin), who is waiting for the loot in his car to 'cool off' before taking it to a fence; world-weary Max then intends to retire from crime into a comfortable bourgeois existence. However, Angelo (Lino Ventura), the leader of a rival gang, wants to get his hands on the loot. The heist itself is never shown, but rather, revealed in a newspaper headline; the bulk of the narrative follows the gangsters as they wait for the right time to sell the loot. But when his friend Riton (René Dary) is kidnapped and held for ransom, Max cannot sit idle. Touchez pas au grisbi opens with a shot of Paris' rooftops, panning slowly down to the iconic Moulin Rouge in Montmartre. Most of the action takes place at night in cafés and nightclubs in Montmartre, where criminals congregate and showgirls dance with aging gangsters, evoking the popular impression of this area as den of sleaze and vice. One club in particular is foregrounded: Mystific on Rue Frochot, owned and operated by 'Fats' Pierrot (Paul Frankeur). Mystific is where Max introduces new mobster Marco (Michel Jourdan) to Pierrot and where we first meet Angelo; this is where Fifi (Daniel Cauchy) is driven at gunpoint and beaten for information concerning Riton's whereabouts, and this is where Riton is later shot to death by Angelo's gang. ->Zachariah Rush
RIFIFI/DU RIFIFI CHEZ LES HOMMES(1955)
LOCATION
Place de Clichy, 8th/17th arrondissements
A HOLLYWOOD EXILE with a poor grasp of French, the blacklisted American director Jules Dassin nonetheless managed to revitalize both the French crime film and his career with Du rififi chez les hommes/Rififi (1955). Dassin's outsider status is reflected in his depiction of Paris, his fresh vision of the city perhaps most evident in the film's dramatic finale. This sequence shows the aging gangster Tony le Stéphanois (Jean Servais) racing his convertible from the outskirts of Paris to the city centre in the company of his godson Tonio (Dominique Maurin), whom he has just rescued from a rival gang. The scene's remarkable tension derives from Dassin's mastery of cinematic time and space: will Tony succeed in bringing Tonio safely home, and in delivering himself back to his underworld milieu, before succumbing to the wounds he received at the hands of the boy's kidnappers? As the car speeds through the city, we catch fleeting glimpses of landmarks both familiar (the Place de l'Étoile and the Arc de Triomphe) and unfamiliar (Place de Clichy, the elevated metro tracks along the Boulevard de Rochechouart). Cross-cutting between Tony's pain-blurred perspective and young Tonio's delirious exhilaration, Dassin gives us fragments of Paris in the winter: bare trees lining the grey boulevards, a corner café, rain-soaked asphalt. Filmed to give the effect of twilight, these images possess a vivid realism that accentuates the scene's pathos. By the journey's end — on a hill in the working-class neighbourhood of Belleville — we've circumnavigated the city, and a life. ->Rebecca Prime
THE RED BALLOON/LE BALLON ROUGE(1956)
LOCATION
Ménilmontant, 20th arrondissement, including Rue des Envierges; Rue Chappe, 18th arrondissement
STARTING WITH Dimitri Kirsanoff's silent film masterpiece, Ménilmontant (1926), the neighbourhood of Ménilmontant has been depicted as a grim quartier plagued by poverty and violence. Lamorisse's short Le ballon rouge (1956) also depicts a grey neighbourhood — yet it is transformed by wonder and fantasy. Le ballon rouge tells the story of a young boy, Pascal (Pascal Lamorisse), who releases a red balloon which then befriends him. The balloon follows him everywhere; they are inseparable. A group of other children become jealous: they capture the balloon and then, in an abandoned lot, hit it with rocks and 'kill' it. Pascal cries over the loss of his friend but, magically, balloons everywhere leave their homes and rally to him from all over Paris. Suddenly the grey streets of Ménilmontant are filled with balloons of all colours: they fly up the steps of Rue Chappe, past the bakery at the corner of Rue des Envierges to converge on the boy. And then, as all children who have ever seen this film remember, the balloons lift Pascal up in to the skies of Paris, away from the sadness of his loss and into a bright and limitless future. Winner of the Palme D'Or for Best Short Film at the 1956 Cannes Film Festival and a 1956 Oscar for Best Original Screenwriting, Le ballon rouge is one of the best known and most Oscar for Best Original Screenwriting, Le ballon rouge is one of the best known and most loved short films of all time. ->Kristiina Hachel
BOB THE GAMBLER/BOB LE FLAMBEUR (1956)
LOCATION
Place Pigalle, 9th arrondissement; Montmartre, 18th arrondissement
MELVILLE SHOT HIS unforgettable film noir, Bob le flambeur, in the Montmartre district of Paris. Bob (Roger Duchesne), a retired gangster with a big heart and charisma to spare, but no luck and little cash to his name, decides to put everything on the line for one last job that could pay big. He assembles a crew and they conceive a plan to rob the Deauville casino. Everything goes as planned until Paolo (Daniel Cauchy) declares their intentions to his girlfriend, Anne (Isabelle Corey), who tells Marc (Gérard Buhr), a police informant. Castigated by Bob for jeopardizing the heist, and hurt that Anne would squeal, Paolo storms off and is here pictured traversing Montmartre in one of the most beautiful — and fateful — scenes of the film. Closing in on Marc as he phones the chief of police, Paolo fires into his back. The shots resound on both ends of the call, and mark a turning point in the film and a debt of blood that Paolo himself will repay. The scene of Marc's death will be paralleled at the conclusion of the film, as Paolo and the crew confront a swarm of tipped-off police officers outside Deauville. Ignorant of Bob's unprecedented luck at blackjack the eve of the heist, and therefore the futility of stealing what has legally been won, Paolo is shot dead in the meaningless battle that ensues. Once hit, he emits a guttural cry that mimics Marc's final croak, accentuating how inhuman, yet commonplace such deaths are. ->Adam Rosenthal
GIGI (1958)
LOCATION
Maxim's, 3 Rue Royale, 1st arrondissement
THE MUSICAL GIGI features two — among many — of Paris's most sparkling locations: the Palais de Glace and Maxim's. Wealthy Parisians frequented those venues to see and be seen. Production design on the film borrowed from French caricaturist Sem's sketches of the Palais de Glaces to recreate the fin de siècle look. At the Palais de Glace, Gaston (Louis Jourdan) treats Gigi (Leslie Caron) to a drink while they watch the skaters, including Gaston's mistress Liane (Eva Gabor), whom Gigi judges as common. Waltzing on ice, skating is reserved for adults, at a time when one could order champagne at the rink. Gaston and Liane then move to Maxim's, the fashionable club where well-to-do Parisian men showed off their mistresses. The clientele gossip (in singsong) about Gaston and Liane, just as they had with Honoré (Maurice Chevalier) and his companion, effectively viewing Gaston as following in the footsteps of his famed playboy uncle. Filming at Maxim's proved difficult because of the prominent mirrors lining its walls, and was thus confined to only a few rooms. Despite the joviality of the Palais de Glaces and Maxim's, for Gaston, 'It's a bore!' When he returns to Maxim's with Gigi — her education as a courtesan nearly complete — Gaston is repulsed that she dotes on him in the same manner as Liane. He misses Gigi's amusing qualities, her frankness and insightfulness. Gaston rejects the idea of turning into his uncle; he wants Gigi for much more than just a tryst, and instead, proposes marriage. ->Zachary Ingle
(Continues...)
Excerpted from World Film Locations Paris by Marcelline Block. Copyright © 2011 Intellect Ltd. Excerpted by permission of Intellect Ltd.
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Table of Contents
Essays
Paris: City of the Imagination – Keith Reader
Paris in the Films of Alice Guy-Blaché (1896–1907) – Alison McMahan
'A Parisian Pari': Agnès Varda’s Cléo de 5 à 7 – Georgiana M.M. Colvile
City of Light, City of Darkness: Paris in Francophone African Films – Françoise Pfaff
Émigré Film-makers in 1930s Paris – Alastair Phillips
La Bella Città: Paris Through the Lens of Italian Directors – Giovanna Summerfield
Remaking the Cinematic City: Claire Denis' Paris – Malini Guha