Who is doing this to me? Why? What I have done to them? I have worked hard to get where I am and I’ll be damned if they destroy everything I’ve earned. They are watching the house round the clock but why can’t I find where they’re filming from? It doesn’t make sense. Then more tapes and stupid drawings arrived. I know very well what they mean but I’m not going to tell anyone until I’ve found out who is terrorizing us. It has to stop. But why now, after all these years? Why not just let sleeping dogs lie? It’s driving me mad and Anne looks at me funny these days. She suspects something’s not quite right, but I can’t tell her anything. Not yet. What are they complaining about? He had a life, didn’t he? If it wasn’t for us, he might not be here at all. He should be grateful for everything we did for him. But, instead, he turns against us, biting the hand that fed him. Some people. What have I got to hide? Nothing. Nothing at all.
ix. Gare du Nord, tenth arrondissement
Every night, when I get home from work, my daughter is there. Her latest thing is her rice cooking machine. She loves it and we have rice every night. She’s my treasure. She’s my light, my heart. I love her more than anything in the world, but she’s growing up. I drive trains out of Gare du Nord. I retire in two weeks and the guys are planning a send-off involving lots of rum. I’ll miss work, but I’m tired, too. I’m a little tired of everything, to be honest. And she is growing up and will leave home soon. There’s a young man courting her but he’ll have to try harder — she’s a tough cookie, just like her mother. She has a temper on her! I don’t want to give her up, but I know I’ll have to. It’s the way of things. She doesn’t want anything to change either. But, I will have to force her to leave, if necessary. She needs to have a life of her own and move on with it. She’s my heart. I will miss her.
Paris at 24 Frames a Second
Richard Kovitch
Cinema is the truth at 24 frames-per-second. And every edit is a lie.
— Michael Sabor, Le Petit soldat (Dir: Jean-Luc Godard, 1963)
I
The images my mind conjures when I think about Paris are, by any measure, extraordinary. Here are some examples:
A beautiful woman walking along the Champs-Elysées, illuminated only by the light from shop windows.
A hit man lying deathly still in a decaying apartment in the Quartier de l’Amérique.
A BMW hurtling towards oncoming traffic in the Champerret Tunnel.
East European hustlers encircling businessmen outside Gare de Lyon.
A man’s head being caved in with a fire extinguisher in a sex club on the Rue de Penthièvre.
You will be reassured to learn none are first-hand experiences, and yet they occupy my mind as if they were. But in reality I have only visited the French capital twice. Once in my early teens, when I found myself camping — yes, camping! — on Haute-Île State Park. Then again in my twenties, when I finally infiltrated the bohemian city to mingle with filmmakers and designers, stumbling through the Catacombs by day; clubbing under Pont Alexandre III at night. Ultimately my lived experiences of this extraordinary city remain as limited as my mastery of the French language. And yet Paris still feels immediate to me — intimate even. How is this possible?
In a sense, it is because I am always visiting Paris. The French film industry remains the third largest in the world, producing over three hundred titles a year. As the national capital, Paris inevitably dominates cinematic representations. To this roster of indigenous talent we must add filmmakers from overseas, moulding the city to their own ends, be it art-house doyens like Michael Haneke (Code Unknown, 2002) or Hollywood thrill-seekers like Tom Cruise (Mission Impossible: Fallout, 2018). Paris has also hosted some of the most memorable spectacles of the media age, from the euphoric (the student riots of 1968, les Bleus’ two World Cup victory parades in 1998 and 2018) to the harrowing (the 2015 Charlie Hebdo massacre and Bataclan terror attacks). Given the unavoidable amplifications, distortions, omissions and prejudices that ensue whenever a camera rolls or an editor cuts, I would be unwise to take any of these depictions at face value. No doubt the Paris of my imagination does not exist. But that does not necessarily render it fictive.
II
The Paris air did him in.
— Paris nous appartient (Dir: Jean Rivette, 1961)
It’s 1965. General de Gaulle flies high above Paris in a helicopter. Alongside him is the politician Paul Delouvrier. Beneath them Greater Paris sprawls. 4,661 square miles. 8.5m citizens. The city looks bleak from the air. It is shabby, fragmented, still liberating itself from the shadow of the Second World War. After an hour, de Gaulle turns to Delouvrier and complains; “Delouvrier, remettez-moi un peu d’ordre dans ce bordel!” (“Clean up this bloody mess, Delouvrier!”). Cohesion is sought; beauty is desired; chaos rejected.
De Gaulle’s lament immediately puts us in mind of Jonathan Raban’s Soft City (1974) and its key insight that the raw urban landscape ultimately awaits the “imprint of identity”. For filmmakers, both local and visiting, this presents great opportunities. Cities may harbour radically different zones in reality, but fictional interpretations can make them cohere. The director Claire Denis has presented the French capital in many different, contradictory ways over her twenty-five-year career — from the transient romance of Vendredi soir (2002) to the hellish dread of Les Salauds (2013) — and each is as plausible as the next. This variety is even more evident when we consider the wider history of French cinema. From the stately Cinéma de papa of the mid-century to the youthful energy of the Nouvelle Vague in the late Fifties; from the pop hedonism of the Cinéma du look in the Eighties to the violent transgressions of the New French Extremity in the Noughties. Far from achieving “cleaning up this bloody mess”, filmmakers compound the sense of chaos by building parallel worlds that readily contradict one another.
First impressions count though, and my earliest impressions of Paris came via the Roman Polanski thriller, Frantic (1988). A minor work in the director’s canon, but a film that remains dear to my heart. Prior to watching Frantic, my only sense of the French capital had been its cameo in the James Bond film A View to a Kill (1985). But where Bond used Paris as glamorous spectacle — replete with Grace Jones parachuting off the Eiffel Tower — Polanski revealed something darker, framing Harrison Ford’s desperate hunt for his wife against the dominant anxieties of mid-Eighties urban life: terrorism, race, narcotics. From its opening scene Frantic establishes Paris through an exile’s eyes. Two Americans, Richard (Ford) and his wife Sondra (Betty Buckley), are slumped in a taxi that has broken down on the Boulevard Périphérique, a ring road that runs like a noose around inner-city Paris. “Do you know where we are?” asks Sondra, half-asleep. “No, it’s changed too much,” replies Richard, surveying the heavy traffic. The city feels hostile, alien… mysterious. We are a long way from the city of romance the couple honeymooned in decades earlier.
Polanski later insisted he was reaching for something more mundane: a “lived in” quality. Paris, after all, was his home. But Polanski being Polanski, the darkness inevitably found its way in. And in emphasising the daily grind of Parisian life — the indifference of strangers, officious bureaucracy, the erotic potential of the city after dark (embodied by the leather-jacketed, gum-chewing, twenty-two-year-old model Emanuelle Seigner) — Polanksi cemented in my mind ideas about Paris that resonate to this day. Here was a very adult city. It felt seedy and intimidating. Nothing could be ventured upon lightly. And yet its pleasures were numerous. It was also seductive. Exotic. Enticing.
As my interest in cinema grew through the Nineties, my ideas about Paris deepened. This wasn’t the result of a conscious effort to immerse myself in French film history — that would come later — but via random VHS rentals that piqued my curiosity (Tartan and Artificial Eye proved significant allies), or if I stumbled across late-night screenings on UK television. As a result, the Paris I encountered owed less to the canonical works of French cinema, far more to the fresh talent that emerged in the Nineties
. Claire Denis and Olivier Assayas would prove to be lifelong devotions, but it was random films that caught my attention at the time, such as Pierre Salvadori’s surreal, black comedy from 1995, Les Apprentis (starring the late Guillaume Depardieu), replete with its mysterious apartments; or the raw, explosive energy of Mathieu Kassovitz’s La Haine (also 1995).
More than any film from this period, my most vivid memory is watching actor/director Cyril Collard’s Les Nuit fauves (1992) late one night on Channel 4. How could a film be so erotic and harrowing all at once? Collard’s Paris is fluid with possibilities, evoked in the driving scenes that depict him hurtling in his red Porsche between disparate lovers as if they were Stations of the Cross. When I later discovered Collard had died weeks after the film was released, aged just thirty-five — from the same HIV-re- lated infection that doomed his on-screen persona — any semblance that cinema could only ever be “make believe” was completely undone.
Fundamentally, these Paris-set films made it abundantly clear the city’s international reputation for escapist romance — emblematic in films such as Vincente Minnelli’s An American in Paris (1951) or Woody Allen’s schmaltzy Midnight in Paris (2011) — simply didn’t hold. In fact, it was a mystery that it had ever been established in the first place. Not only does this postcard Paris feature surprisingly little in indigenous French films, but other motifs occur with a far greater frequency: the anonymity of crowds, heavy traffic, the cavernous apartment, raw sexuality, a love/hate relationship with American culture, even traces of the Occult. More a city of darkness then, than a city of light.
III
Lives will cross, their destinies disconnected…
— Bob le flambeur (Dir: Jean-Pierre Melville, 1955)
These themes found their apotheosis in Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango In Paris (1972), a film I first saw on VHS in the mid-Nineties. I knew of its reputation through hearsay, but when I finally watched it I was quickly availed of any ideas it was “soft porn”. Opening with Marlon Brando cursing God underneath the Pont de Bir-Hakeim, and climaxing with a bullet to his back in a dingy apartment in Passy, it is a film fixated as much upon death as sex. Pauline Kael’s review upon the film’s release argued it was “the most powerfully erotic movie ever made, and it may turn out to be the most liberating movie ever made”. I’m not sure that still holds — Betty Blue (1986) and Blue is the Warmest Colour (2013) are subsequent contenders regarding eroticism — but it continues to exert an extraordinary power. Paris’s wintry exteriors evoke a harsh solitude; hot, Francis Bacon-inspired interiors incubate Brando and Schneider’s spiral of abuse and anonymous sex. Significantly, it still feels like a story that could only play out in Paris.
But then, isn’t that how I always feel when watching my favourite Paris-set films? They all seem to locate something that’s essentially “true” about the city, even as their aesthetics diverge dramatically from one another. How can Claude Chabrol’s dark thriller, Juste avant la nuit (1971), and its unearthing of the moral turpitude of the French bourgeoisie, feel as equally “Parisian” as Claude Sautet’s playful Nineties romance Nelly & Monsieur Arnaud (1996)? Why does the sci-fi dystopia of Jean-Paul Godard’s Alphaville (1965) feel in some way connected with the ominous modernity of the banlieues depicted in Céline Sciamma’s Girlhood (2014)? Or consider Jean-Pierre Melville’s extraordinary noirs starring Alain Delon (Le Samouraï, 1967, Le Cercle rouge, 1971, Un flic, 1972). These films construct a coolly modern Paris, inscrutable to outsiders, otherworldly even. We sense the city’s fluidity as, over the course of the trilogy, Delon effortlessly ghosts between roles as both criminal and police officer, his on-screen persona enriched by off-screen entanglements in L’Affaire Markovic (1969) that connected him directly to gangland Paris. “I always lived my roles,” he would claim ominously in 2018. “I’ve never acted.” And yet for all the “reality” Delon implies, we must not forget how Melville’s films heavily pastiche US noir, or that they bare zero traces of the late-Sixties counterculture disrupting the boulevards of the city at the time of their production.
IV
What facts? This is the supernatural. Nothing is clear.
— Henri de Maublanc, Le Diable probablement (Dir: Robert Bresson, 1977)
This then is the chaos that frustrated de Gaulle when he looked down on the city and demanded order. And yet it is this same chaos that fuels Paris’s creative life. Films set in Paris might provide scant assistance to anyone attempting to navigate the city on foot, but as guides to our inner lives they are invaluable. The best even alert us to media deceptions, challenging our perceptions, warning us of the implicit bias that exists in us all. Consider Michael Haneke’s assault on media and memory in Code Unknown (2000) and Caché (2005). Or the near-virtual worlds that converge in Leos Carax’s Holy Motors (2012). Or the consumerism and political stasis that lurk at the heart of Bertrand Bonello’s Nocturama (2016). In Antonio Campos’s Simon Killer (2012), Brady Courbet’s eponymous loner travels to Paris seeking romantic renewal, only to end up masturbating alone watching internet pornography. Paris is resistant to his fantasies. Reality has failed him. But in its place deeper truths are unearthed.
And so I continue to understand the French capital through disparate, but extraordinary images. I may still know very little about the real Paris. But the freedom to get lost in images of this great city has proven invaluable in shaping a deeper understanding of the modern world:
The crack of gunfire as a young man makes a bid for freedom on Rue Campagne Première.
Chewing gum stuck carefully to an iron railing as a man draws his last breath on a balcony in Passy.
Nico’s “Janitor of Lunacy” playing over the dying embers of a teenage party.
A Mercedes-Benz speeding towards a rendezvous with the driver’s lover as twilight falls.
The statue of Joan of Arc outside Place des Pyramides engulfed in flames.
The Past is a Foreign City
David Collard
In the 1980s I had a poorly-paid job in London but, living frugally in cheap digs off the Tottenham Court Road and with few overheads, I could afford to nip across to Paris quite often, although “nip” was hardly the word back then.
Before the tunnel opened in 1994 it took a day to get there, catching the ten o’clock train from Victoria to Dover, a slow ferry or wallowing hovercraft to Calais and then another train, arriving at Gare du Nord in the early evening. Next (in my case) the southbound Métro and the warm urban sillage of garlic, saucisson sec, Gitanes, brake dust, rubber, urinals and fermenting sweat. Ten stops to Odéon and a no-star hotel. In my duffel-bag a spare shirt, a bottle of duty-free cognac, thermos flask, earplugs, books and cigarettes. We all smoked then, everywhere, all the time. I remember students from Marcel Marceau’s School of Mimodrama on Rue René-Boulanger milling around outside at lunchtime, none of them miming but all of them actually smoking. Skinny in leggings and leotards, they looked like Giacometti sculptures.
I never visited the Eiffel Tower or Notre-Dame or the Sacré-Cœur and still haven’t. What a friend’s father, a dashing young man in the late 1920s, called “Gaypers” — a flapper-era contraction of “Gay Paree” — was not for me. No champers on the Champs-Élysées, no Belle Epoque hankie-pankie, no Folies Bergère or Moulin Rouge, no ooh-la-la. By the 1980s all that was for chortling Brits who referred to “the Continong”. I had other priorities.
What drew me there were the films made by a cohort of directors between the late 1950s and early 1970s — the nouvelle vague. I’d sat transfixed through a trailblazing Barbican retrospective in 1984 and, now hooked, I wanted to see everything, by everyone: Robert Bresson, Claude Chabrol, Jacques Demy, Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais, Éric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, François Truffaut, Agnès Varda, the lot. I was a discriminating glutton or, like Isabelle Huppert’s character in Hal Hartley’s Amateur, a nymphomaniac virgin. Asked how this is possible, she replies: “I’m just choosy”. I was choosy, but I wanted it all and in that pre-digital era you had
to go to Paris.
In the mornings I would haunt a handful of stores selling back-issues of Cahiers du Cinéma and scripts and press books and lurid Belgian posters, spending many hours contentedly riffling through thousands of dog-eared lobby cards and glossy Studio Harcourt portraits. (“En France, on n’est pas acteur si l’on n’a pas été photographié par les Studios d’Harcourt” wrote Barthes in Mythologies.) I remember the dozens of cardboard boxes tightly packed with tatty manila envelopes on which were scrawled, in thick black felt tip, the name of the star, or director, or film, or genre. I recall the thrill of expectation when teasing open a packet labelled CARETTE (Julien), or MODOT (Gaston) or VIGO (Jean) or BARDOT (first name unnecessary), or my namesake COLLARD (Cyril), director of Les Nuits fauves, who died aged thirty-five from an AIDS-related illness three days before his only feature film won a clutch of Césars.
Afternoons and evenings were spent either at the rather formal Cinémathèque Française or sprawled in the dark on lumpy seats in a Left Bank salle obscure, raptly yearning. As a sedentary flâneur I’d watch four or five films a day, not only New Wave but Popular Front productions from the 1930s and cult American movies admired by the Cahiers critics, such as Shock Corridor and Hellzapoppin’. Back in my hotel room after midnight, I’d guzzle whatever food I’d picked up on my way and scribble some notes. I was measuring out my life in fleapits and flophouses, creating new memories. I needed to stock up.
A particular memory is of a damp November evening in 1987. I was twenty-six and in Paris for three nights. Cars with warm yellow headlights swoosh by as I trudge along Rue Saint-Jacques. In my overcoat pocket is the weekly listings magazine Pariscope, the many pages dedicated to film annotated with ticks, crosses and question marks. I’m heading for one of the small cinemas clustered around the Sorbonne — L’Accatone on Rue Cujas, which, as we cinephiles knew, had been managed in the 1960s by Truffaut himself. Recently refurbished, it featured a gallery, a tiny bar and a bookshop stocked with Baudrillard, Barthes, Kristeva and Foucault. I arrived to find the bright lobby packed with damp overcoats, their occupants poring over copies of Pariscope, smoking.
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