We'll Never Have Paris

by Andrew Gallix

  Cléo is the portrait of a woman inscribed within a documentary about Paris, as Varda puts it. She is, to use Lauren Elkin’s term, a flâneuse, as well as an adopted Parisian. Her fear is not only of death, but the provincial fear of the big city, which was Varda’s when she first moved to the capital. Standing on the Boulevard de l’Hôpital as she leaves the park, Cléo observes that the thirteenth and fourteenth arrondissements contain the largest number of hospitals in Paris. Because she has carried the fear of illness with her along her itinerary (which the viewer has witnessed through flashback images, conspicuously meaningful street signs, and the omnipresent gaze of strangers), this realisation forms another uncanny dimension to Cléo’s world, which seems to be closing in. It is, she quips sarcastically, almost as if “one were better cared for” in these arrondissements than anywhere else in the capital.

  Today, as if to confirm this supposition, a private clinic on the Boulevard Jourdan, the Institut Mutualiste Montsouris, takes its name from the park where Cléo meets Antoine, a young soldier about to return to the war in Algeria. It is where my father was admitted on 12 May 2015 on the eve of his scheduled esophagectomy, a surgery procedure to remove a cancerous part of his upper stomach and lower oesophagus. Papa had already undergone chemotherapy for a few months and we were informed that he may not survive the operation.

  When I speak to him on the phone on the night before the procedure, I try to sound calm so as to be the support I tell myself that he needs. By this point, I am in London, where I have lived for years. The name “Montsouris”, pronounced by the receptionist, makes me think of Cléo, who puns on the name in the film. I try hard to think of France and everything that once felt like home, but to no avail. The home country means little in this moment, because the everyday feels out of bounds.

  3.

  If you type “Paris” and “everyday” in the Google search bar you’ll be directed to blogs promising to instruct the reader on how to “do Paris like a local”, and American Express-sponsored travel sites explaining in a short paragraph that the French art de vivre is ubiquitous. You too, New Yorker, it seems to say, could learn from this subtly alternative (passé? out of time?) way of life. Witness for yourself the locals taking the time to go for a stroll on the banks of the Seine, wearing perfectly chic yet casual clothing, or simply walking to the local boulangerie to buy a baguette, or else meet a friend in a café in the middle of the afternoon as if work deadlines were not piling up. I too, used to look at Parisians thinking I could learn something about either style or belonging or both.

  In my student years, I experienced the Latin Quarter as a hub filled with people who were just passing through, where my efforts to feel attached required constant negotiation. Populated by a few key Métro stations, the iconic Saint-Michel fountain, two Sorbonnes, and the bridges that lead to Notre Dame, the heart of Paris looked and felt like an open-air museum celebrating the cultural energy of days gone by. Its smell was the smell of its antique book stands, showcasing reprints of Janis Joplin gig posters among yellowing Louis-Ferdinand Céline paperbacks, wrapped in plastic. Not being a Parisian, I had a desire for some sort of connection which for a moment I hoped to find among Paris’s international population. In those days, I studied English at the Sorbonne and, like many of my peers, I only cared for American writers, but this was no port of entry into the Anglosphere: when I applied for a job at Shakespeare and Company, I was told politely that the shop preferred to give work to international — Anglophone — students. Being neither a Parisian nor an émigré, I felt completely out of step with the Quartier Latin.

  In my spare time I took to exploring regions of the capital where I had nothing particular to do, in search of a neighbourhood where the elusive everyday, I firmly believed, would be restored to Paris: what George Perec defined as “what happens when nothing happens, except for the weather, people, cars, and clouds”. There, via Monge, then Gobelins and beyond Place d’Italie, I experienced, as many others have before me, a city living the life of a provincial town, filled with non-iconic street names and quieter everyday lives: children leaving school, acquaintances starting conversations outside local pharmacies while trying to make each other believe that they’re in a rush; tower blocks here and there, looking on to the suburbs, with their sparse communal gardens, the young and multicultural families.

  By the time of my father’s operation, I had traded the hope of becoming a Parisian for the certitude of being a foreigner in London. Travelling across the Channel to visit him sent me back to the fourteenth arrondissement with a new-found sense of purpose. No longer a flâneuse, it seemed fit for me to use public transport. Dispatched by the Eurostar in raucous and familiar Gare du Nord, I took the RER B and got off at Cité Universitaire — the southernmost station in Paris intra-muros.

  The clinic, a five-minute walk from the gates of the Parc Montsouris, was a bright transparent building which, on that day in May, let quantities of warm daylight shine through. In the gastroenterology department I was instructed to wait outside a set of steel doors before entering the sterilised post-op recovery room, where, once I was let through, I found Papa very much alive but recording signs of physical and emotional shock due to the anaesthetics. My mother and brother were beside him, but neither of them seemed to register my presence. Only my father did. “Oh no,” he said to me as soon as he saw me walking in. “Now you too are going to see me like this.”

  4.

  In the months following my father’s diagnosis at the beginning of the previous winter, the idea that his life was threatened had affected my world with an odd and insidious violence, making me wonder by what mad set of circumstances I had found myself living outside the home country independently of my parents’ bodies.

  In recent years, a surge of new writing on motherhood (Sheila Heti, Jacqueline Rose, Lara Feigel, Chris Parker, and a few years before them Maggie Nelson, among others), has given way to a renewed discussion of what it means politically to inhabit the female body. It seems obvious, but equally inescapable, that mothers are the sites of an original belonging, and that to address motherhood is to address the space, the powers and limits of the female body. It is also to address the physical labour of parenthood, and the structural inequalities to which these bodies are subjected in their labours. Fathers, in society, seem to occupy a symbolic — aristocratic? — space in comparison. A father historically is a name and a status. The elusive assurance of protection. Closely intertwined with the duty of financial support, the father’s commitment to a child’s life is historically, socially, what gives it value.

  Annie Ernaux’s father in La Place is a stature, a Sunday suit, a figure of repressed tenderness and reliable material generosity, the photographer’s shadow on a holiday snapshot. And what further form of closeness is, from a father to a daughter, desirable or appropriate? Among the few moments of closeness that my father and I shared independently of the rest of the family were the evening walks we took after dinner when I was a teenager. I remember this ritual fondly, because it enabled me to enjoy the strange climate of our streets after sundown. The low buzz of electric cables. The odd fellow wanderer, always male, always alone, who would give my father a nod as we crossed paths, but always ignore me. My father was not obviously built to be a protector, but there was no doubt that the fact that I was walking beside him meant symbolically that I was safe. Through him, I imagined and wondered at what it must be like to feel free of one’s movements, to not live in fear, to think of oneself as an agent, sufficient, mobile.

  Cléo de 5 à 7 deals with a subject that was certainly unpopular among French audiences and producers in the 1960s: cancer. But the dimension of the film which has endured in cinema’s collective imagination is that of a woman walking alone through the streets of Paris, owning her right to look out on to the world — no longer guided by the consciousness of her own body as a visual object. “Pour moi,” says Varda, “le premier acte féministe c’est de lever les yeux de son nombril ou de sa cuisine
et de se mettre à regarder autour de soi.” The first feminist act is to look up from one’s navel or kitchen and start looking around. It makes a lot of sense to me that, among the more or less generous reviews that the film received upon its original release, Arts magazine immediately compared Cléo to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. The perspective of the female subject asserting or inventing her perspective through her walks in the city did not have an obvious precedent in French literature.

  In Varda’s only other full-length film set in Paris, Daguerréotypes (1975), Marcelle, the wife of the perfume-maker on Rue Daguerre, watches the hours bleed into the evening from the boutique’s window and manifests the physical impulse to go out as soon as it gets dark. Off camera, her husband calls out to her, asking her to come back in. “She always seems to want out after dark”, he explains to the invisible filming crew, while the camera shows Marcelle walk out, close the door behind her, anxiously look up the street, and immediately come back in. She does not actually want to leave.

  Paris is the first city where I ever felt free to take evening walks unaccompanied by my father.

  5.

  Long were the months when I was inhabited by an odd and helpless desire to wrap my arms around my father’s shoulders, to hold him like a child and protect him against an ill that was in fact internal and against which I could do absolutely nothing. That feeling never completely receded after Dad survived the operation and entered what we would be encouraged to call “remission”, after another round of routine chemotherapy would permanently take away his taste for coffee and red wine. For the first time, everyday life struck me as a fiction we briefly believe in when loss has not yet occurred.

  I stayed in Paris for a whole week following the surgery and visited my father daily, sitting beside his bed on the large windowsill, basking in the light that heated the room and accentuated the smells of uncollected urine, watching the medical fluids coming in and out of the drain and tubes that traversed his lower abdomen.

  My mother and brother were there too. We were at peace; we hardly spoke. Now and then I would lift my eyes from the pages of a magazine to stare out the window and survey Cléo’s park in front of me, the lush greenery Varda had chosen as the setting for her heroine, to protect her against the odds.

  I imagined Varda shooting the film there, not on the first day of spring, as she originally intended, but on the day of the summer solstice. She did not regret, in hindsight, this delay, mainly because of the dappled light it produced under the trees of Montsouris.

  Men, writes Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex, are favourably conditioned to regard their bodies as objective points of contact with the physical world. This neutral body which is not weighed down by the burden of being specific or other, she writes, believes its connection to the cosmos to be legitimate and natural. For that perspective to be granted to a woman in narrative cinema is rare and valuable. This, I would like to be able to share with the men of my family.

  After Agnès

  Niven Govinden

  I had this idea to photograph the same street where Agnès Varda filmed Daguerréotypes in 1976. The documentary had left a deep impression on me since I’d seen it several months earlier, reflecting an interest in communities and their loss. The spark was something both romantic and sociological, most keenly felt in the quotidian for artisans and small businesses. During my regular trips to Paris I was in the habit of photographing everything, from the food on my plate to the graffiti I’d hunted out as a teenager, using various tags to map my way across the river. Early on I recognised that my interest was in the inanimate; how my Polaroids were strictly mineral and vegetable over animal (bar cute dogs). I loved the street scenes of Brassaï or Doisneau but was unable to replicate that, my eye more easily caught by rusting ironwork or crumbling stone. Similar to my writing, my best photographs came once the blood had been drained. Still, I was obsessed with the Varda film and its characters. The shopkeepers were long dead, but the totems of decaying storefronts would be how I paid homage. For the same reasons, Detroit was always on my mind; desperate to see in person and through a lens how the great civic buildings of the last century had been abandoned and reduced to shells in the wake of the collapse of the auto industry and the fleeing middle class. I wouldn’t find this on Rue Daguerre, but if I looked hard there would be similar ghosts. However, as much as I wanted to, my feet wouldn’t take me to that side of the 14th. I was scared of what I would find: perhaps a Carrefour Express in place of the perfumers. Worse, I was scared of being disappointed, that the ongoing renewal of a street would decimate any onscreen recognition I had. The regeneration of Soho posed a similar problem but there I clung on to what I knew: low winter light rising over Berwick Street; the maze you cross from Poland to Dean Street; that Ronnie Scotts and Bar Italia would be going nowhere. I was too late to create a similar landscape for Rue Daguerre because it had never been part of my Paris life since I’d been coming over as a teenager. My certainties lay in the doorway of my stationers in the 4th, there since the mid-Seventies, in the marble and tilework of the Boulangerie Murciano on Rue des Rosiers, and on the cobbles of Rue Viollet-le-Duc where I once saw a boy who made my heart stop beating inside my chest. Wood, ceramic, stone, my equilibrium gleaned from these and what I record: my daguerreotypes.

  In Search of the Grinning Cats

  Adam Scovell

  A pair of cats are relaxing on the concrete in Rue Courat. One is an orange tabby whilst the other is a radioactive yellow with very white teeth. Both are on stilts and grinning with rebellious mischief. I had come what had seemed a long way to see them, all the way from Montmartre in fact, in the stifling heat, a few days before 14 July. The cats are an artwork created by the graffiti artist Monsieur Chat, in memory of the filmmaker Chris Marker.

  Marker, one of the pivotal artists of the twentieth century, had lived in the chaos of the house that sits behind the wall; filled with owls, cats and paraphernalia surrounding Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. It made for a perfect pilgrimage. But I had felt the idea to be subliminally implanted from the previous day’s wandering. M. Chat himself had put the idea into my head, having seen his yellow cat grinning down from another wall further into Montmartre, one of the cats actually seen in Marker’s Chats perchés. “We must go,” I said to my partner, “to see Chris Marker’s cats.” She has my sympathies in hindsight for I had already used our time in the city to go to the house where Michael Haneke had filmed Caché, the road that ends Jean-Luc Godard’s À bout de souffle and Éric Rohmer’s grave. Dinner was on me for the foreseeable.

  It felt odd to finally arrive at the mural. Marker had always been such an ephemeral figure himself: the photographer rarely photographed, the filmmaker rarely on screen, the Cheshire Cat that smiled before quickly fading into the ether. Disappearance was part of his endeavour. When his death was announced in 2012, I remember thinking two things. The first was that I couldn’t decide if I had previously already thought him dead. His elusiveness gave the impression of a ghostly loss. The second was that I didn’t quite believe now that he was dead. He was more like Schrödinger’s Cat than other felines: the possibility of both options was always strangely there, the illusion of which was only broken when a new project or film found its way into the world. Seeing the mural on the wall opened the box to show that sadly the cat had left this time for good; not for Tokyo or Vietnam, or the West Bank for wine with Varda and Resnais, but somewhere beyond us all.

  I wanted to take a singular photo of the mural, but ended up snapping away most of my reel of film. The trip as a whole felt like compensation for something, not least an escape from England at the time, but also a quiet acknowledgement that I wanted to be here among the grinning cats too. Paris is a city of cinema in a way that no other city really can be. Only Paris could descend into ground-breaking riots starting with the political wrangling of the Cinémathèque. Only Paris would name an underground station after Delphine Seyrig, and squares after Jacques Demy or Jean Renoir. And only
Paris would spray its walls in the memory of the most avant-garde of filmmakers. The cats still grin, of course, that ginger tabby and his yellow friend with the white teeth. It’s because they know they’re home.

  Hulot sur la jetée

  C.D. Rose

  I have never seen Paris rawly waking, crude sunlight on her lemon streets. I have not sensed the moist pith of farls of bread, nor frog-green wormwood, nor matin incense courting the air. The first time I visited Paris, I smelled piss outside the Gare du Nord.

  I was twenty-one, twenty-two maybe. Some friends had got a cheap ticket for the night ferry and a train and asked me along. We arrived and walked out of the station, and the first thing I saw was a guy casually unzip and let flow, oblivious to the great city passing around him, briefly catching my eye as I caught his. Such was my great welcome to the Ville lumière.

  We stayed in the cheapest place we could find, a hot, breathless, flock-wallpapered room in a nearby pension. Now, when I look to see if the Hotel Jarry still exists, I find 40% of TripAdvisor reviewers classify it as “average”, 16% “terrible”.

  I remember little of the rest of the trip, save for standing in queues and getting ripped off. I have no photographs of that time, so perhaps it never happened at all. It matters little; I have not been to Paris many times since then.

  There are many ways of not going to Paris. I have done it by reading books, looking at photographs, listening to songs, and watching films. Once I did it by falling in love.

  I had had an invitation from a girl I hardly knew. (I had met her at an art gallery in Italy. She had unruly hair and bee-stung lips, and swung an early Seventies Nikon F2 around her neck. What else could I do?) I got the cheapest flight I could find (the intervening years had not been financially generous); she told me she would meet me at the airport.