The French collection

As the inspiration for two new seasons, Wally Hammond argues that Paris is a movie star in its own right,

Feb  9 2007

Two current seasons – the 58 films, documentaries and shorts that make up the Ciné Lumière's Paris at the Movies, and the smaller Tales from a City programme accompanying the National Gallery's Renoir exhibition – make a compelling case for Paris's position as the most photogenic city in the world. Okay, the City of Light is a beautiful city – but so are New York, London and Rome. It's more than that. Somehow, generations of filmmakers have not only transformed its iconic buildings, grand thoroughfares and bustling cafés into a magical cinematic spectacle, but posed Paris as a character itself.

The earliest film included in the Ciné Lumière season is Louis Feuillade's short 'La Course aux Potirons', in which you can watch a couple of lads chase pumpkins through the Paris streets of 1907. In those days, mere realism was spectacle, mere movement a thrilling kinetic ballet. The '20s saw the era of City Symphonies, here represented by Alberto Cavalcanti's 'Rien que les Heures' and Dimitri Kirsanoff's 'Ménilmontant', working-class dramas that elevate the streets into the poetic hero.

Poetic realists of the '30s like Marcel Carné dispensed with them altogether, preferring set-designer Alexandre Trauner to re-create nostalgic renditions of the tumble-roofed houses of the Canal Saint Martin in 'Hotel du Nord' and the 1820s Boulevard de Crime of 'Les Enfants du Paradis', nostalgic bulwarks against the threat of war and invasion. (You can see the bustling pre-war cafés of Montparnasse for real in poet Jacques Prévert's portrait 'Paris la Belle' of 1960.)

The eerie unreality of the Occupation period is beautifully caught in Edgardo Cosarinsky's rarely-screened documentary gem, 'One Man's War'. In that film you can see German invaders goose-stepping down Haussmann's Grands Boulevards, where in 1959 Jean Seberg would be selling the Herald Tribune in Godard's new wave debut, 'Breathless'. Godard used the same Grand Avenues to represent a dystopian future in 'Alphaville', and the same streets are roamed in Eric Rohmer's 'Le Signe du Lion', conjuring feelings of destitution, loneliness and poverty.

Certain locations have become part of the psychogeography of Paris – like the faded neo-classicist Salle Wagram in 'Last Tango in Paris'. In the same film, there's threat in the way Vittorio Storaro shoots the traffic of the double-ramped Passy viaduct which Brando later crosses, earlier the location for the wanderings of Maurice Ronet's ex-paratrooper in Louis Malle's 'Lift to the Scaffold'.

One of the most inventive and suggestive uses of location is the ronde of the beautiful large and small gardens of Paris in which the lovers meet in Rohmer's 'Les Rendez-vous de Paris', or the insoucience of Godard having his lovers rollerskate through the Louvre in 'Bande à Part'. Romantic Paris is not dead. Its spirit may be recognisable in 'An American in Paris' or 'Gigi', even if Minnelli shot those on the Culver City lot, but it is recaptured by Richard Linklater in 'Before Sunrise'.

Latterly graffiti has covered Paris. It features in essayist extraordinaire Chris Marker's meditation on post-9/11 realities 'The Case of the Grinning Cat'; also in Mathieu Kassovitz's 'La Haine' as racist daubings on the concrete of the estates of les banlieues. The change wrought by the new immigrant waves into Paris has seen filmmakers change their focus from the centre to the edges, as in Bertrand and his son Nils Tavernier's documentary 'De L'Autre Côté du Périph', which looks at the North African milieu of Montreuil.
These films show Paris as a protean beast, as multi-faceted and irreducible as a diamond. Its cinematic quality is still being rediscovered by new filmmakers. For them and for us, long may it continue to be the greatest film-set in the world.

Paris at the Movies runs to Feb 22 and Tales from a City to March 24.

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