by Lauren Elkin
Napoleon III tried to learn the lessons of the 1830 and 1848 revolutions, recognising that whoever owned the streets of Paris would own the battles that took place there. To this end, he asked his personal urban planner, Baron Haussmann, to take these mass uprisings into account in his redesign of the city. Walter Benjamin describes the way he did this in the Arcades Project: ‘Widening the streets is designed to make the erection of barricades impossible, and new streets are to furnish the shortest route between the barracks and the workers’ districts. Contemporaries christen the operation “strategic embellishment”.’25
But wider boulevards just call for larger barricades.
Barriers never do their job; there is always someone willing to go the long way around. Which, I am convinced, is the only reasonable way past them: steam right through, by all means, but that is the way towards violence and armed conflict. Find a way around. ‘On s’en fout des frontières,’ they chanted in 1968. We don’t give a shit about borders.
There has to be an element of surprise, if the doings of many people are to put paid to apathy, to burst through their everyday habits and worries, and reroute thought. There has to be a feeling of pushing against boundaries. In 1968, reading the accounts, you can see them – students, workers, everyday people – searching out that tipping point, where it all turns over. Something in the city, the charged energy between the people marching, pushing everything forward. Tip – tip – tip – there it goes – or almost –
And then it doesn’t. The police are there to make sure it doesn’t. They don’t need to remake the city. They just need to quash the gatherers. Or delegitimise them.
* * *
‘It is far too early to tear down the barricades,’ wrote my mentor Jane Marcus in the 1980s, encouraging the ‘good girl’ feminists not to put away their tents quite yet and ‘slip quietly into the establishment.’26
* * *
It all comes down to a question of borders, a subject to which I am, by now, very sensitive.27 The more I read Gallant’s account of 1968, the more I realise it wasn’t about students or dorms or mores. It was about immigration.
* * *
What Gallant does find heartening in 1968 is the students’ defence of Cohn-Bendit. By mid-May the government was calling for his expulsion not only from Nanterre, but from France. Having been born stateless, the child of German Jews who had fled the Nazis, despite having lived in France nearly all his life, his ‘Frenchness’ was up for debate. ‘I hear them chanting, “Nous sommes tous des juifs-allemands”,’ Gallant writes (‘We are all German Jews’). She can’t believe her ears. ‘This is France, they are French, I am not dreaming … It is the most important event, I think, since the beginning of this fantastic month of May, because it means a mutation in the French character: a generosity. For the first time, I hear a French voice go outside the boundaries of being French.’28 That they are able to identify to this point with the Other, a people so recently expelled from France, handed over to be exterminated, is an incredible leap of empathy. Could this empathy be the real legacy of 1968? Whatever their motivations – whether they were caught up in the joy of it, or in the cult of personality around Daniel Cohn-Bendit, or just trying to piss off their parents or the police, or call them out for not standing up twenty years earlier, the youth of 1968 walked up the Boulevard Saint-Michel shouting We are all German Jews. Perhaps in another ten years they’ll shout: We are from the banlieue, too.
* * *
I thought of that after the Charlie Hebdo attacks, when I stood alongside one and a half million people in the streets near République, in mourning, solidarity and defiance, in the biggest manifestation in Paris since the liberation in 1944. How much fracturing and dissent was covered over that day? A few people talked about how they wouldn’t go, that they refused to march behind Sarkozy or Netanyahu or Ben Ali, that they rejected the binary invented by the media, pitting freedom against extremism, ‘us’ against the terrorists, calling it a ‘superficial consensus’ that wilfully tried to forget ‘the fractures, the profound divisions in France’.29 And yet none of us on the ground that day would have claimed that the group was unified in anything other than a desire to speak up and shout back, as we walked with our children, and our dogs, and our signs reading Je suis Charlie, Je ne suis pas Charlie, Je suis Ahmed, Je suis les frères Kouachi, Je suis manipulé, Je suis Charlie Juif Musulman Policier. We were everybody, we were everything. We were an entire city of opinions. We argued with each other along the route and in the cafés, and when we went home that night. The key is to keep arguing.
We stood for an hour on Boulevard du Temple, a street Sand most certainly strode down in her defiant trousers. We shuffled forward a few inches at a time, the crowd chanting Char-lie and li-ber-té, occasionally bursting into the Marseillaise, repaving the ground with our good intentions while singing the bloodiest of national anthems. Marchons, marchons, qu’un sang impur abreuve nos sillons [March on, march on, let impure blood water the furrows of our land]. If you’re going to sing the song, you have to face what it’s saying. The fractures are right there in its lyrics, its xenophobia, its violence. Can we détourne it, reroute it, remake it, in the way we receive it from those who left it to us? There’s a children’s verse to the French national anthem, about how they will rise up once the adults are dead and gone: We will have the sublime pride of avenging them or following them. Who knows what the children are learning as they march with us today.
Here there was once a prison. Here there were once theatres. Here lived Gustave Flaubert. Here they tried to kill a king. Here Daguerre took a photograph, and it is thought to be the earliest surviving picture of a person. I took a picture of a woman in a long black dress, in a black hat, covered with netting, motionlessly, looking at the crowd. She looked like an apparition from another century. So singular and alone, a black mark of mourning against the building. I thought of Sand when we’d finished the march, and gone upstairs to our friends’ flat on the Boulevard Voltaire to watch the hundreds of thousands of people who were still marching as night fell, and I remembered Sand’s description of the funeral procession for those who were killed in the February 1848 uprising, all the people packing the streets between the July Column and the Madeleine, except here it was all the boulevards from Nation to République.
I thought of Sand, too, a few days earlier, when I went to the Place de la République to see the impromptu shrine that the statue of Marianne, symbol of the Republic, had become. People had drawn pictures and scrawled slogans in French and English on the marble base of the statue, Criez fort, L’engagement, ce mot qui donne un sens à la liberté, Liberté de penser et aussi d’écrire, C’est l’encre qui doit couler et pas le sang, What kind of society are we building? They had left drawings, pens galore, piles of flowers, tea lights that never seemed to go out. That first night all these people climbed the statue and hung from it defiantly, as if it were a barricade. And when the madmen came for us on 13 November 2015, once again we gathered at Republique and decked Marianne with posters and flowers. Official gatherings were forbidden. There was no march. But we found each other, and held each other, in the square.
One day this will all be a memory.
And one day beyond that it will be a plaque.
And one day they’ll all walk past it, with something else to protest or prove, and maybe they will think of us.
east on Boulevard des Invalides which becomes Boulevard Montparnasse which becomes Boulevard Port-Royal
PARIS
NEIGHBOURHOOD
I’m learning to see.
– Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
Yesterday the complete filmography of Agnès Varda came in the mail. The box weighed at least two kilos, the size of a small cat. I’ve been a devoted fan of the most lovable director of the nouvelle vague, with her exuberant spirit and medieval monk’s haircut, ever since I first saw Cléo de 5 à 7 (1962), a film which tracks, minute for minute, a young woman’s moveme
nts around Paris, mostly in and around Montparnasse, in real time. Tout(e) Varda, the filmography’s called, a pun on the French words for all and quite – all of Varda, quite Varda. The postman tracked me down on a Saturday afternoon in a café near my apartment, where I was having lunch with a friend, and brought the package over. The café manager was amused. C’est bien de se faire livrer son courrier ici! How convenient to get your mail delivered here!
I opened the package right then and there. Eleven DVDs, two films per DVD, with assorted courts métrages. A little booklet of photographs and liner notes. And some kind of little envelope of stuff that I left for later.
When I got home I opened the little envelope with great curiosity. It turned out to be a trove of postcards and Varda-esque trinkets:
1) A DVD in a paper sleeve called Les trois vies d’Agnès et Quelques Veuves de Noirmoutier.
2) A DVD in a paper sleeve called inédits et inattendus, dont Nausicaa 1970.
3) A postcard of a woman walking barefoot next to a cement wall that is bare except for a poster which is partially torn off, so that we see only the smiling face and curled hair of a blonde woman. Turn the card over and it says: Sophia Loren au Portugal, Povoa de Varzim, 1956.
4) A postcard providing the recipe for gratin de côtes de blettes with bits of trivia worked into the recipe, e.g. Step 8: Place in the preheated oven (‘It was as dark as an oven; the sky was dressed this evening like Scaramouche.’ Molière).
5) A postcard, or possibly a sticker, featuring the poster art of all of Varda’s feature-length films.
6) A postcard with a drawing that looked like something you’d see on a tarot card, of a woman standing on a tower, looking out into the distance, and waving a red handkerchief. The card reads: ‘But where is Agnès hiding … and her cat?’ There is a little cartoon Agnès drawn onto the woman’s dress. Her cat is upside down on the tower. At the bottom it reads: ‘Anne, my sister Anne, do you see anything coming? The poor woman replied – I see two knights, but they are still quite far off.’ It’s true, there are two men on horseback wending their way to the castle. But Agnès and her cat are already there, if you know to look for them. I promptly hung this card up on my mirror.
7) A film negative showing two women in red dresses and feathered headdresses.
8) Another card with cats drawn on it which says, ‘There’s a little Chris Marker in all of us.’ On the back are quotes from the late Chris Marker, the legendary film-maker and a good friend of Varda’s (‘Television is great. It moves, it’s lively, it’s like an aquarium full of parakeets’). One cat is Chris Marker’s avatar, Guillaume-en-Egypte; it also appears in Les plages d’Agnès and speaks with the digitised voice of Marker himself.
9) A stencil of the Ciné-Tamaris mascot cat, Zgougou.
10) A little piece of wood with a hand on it, with finger pointing, on which is written: ‘Qui commence?’ On the back is a little red bead. I realise this little wooden thing is the spinner for some kind of game, or perhaps for any game, to be spun on its bead to decide who goes first.
11) Another card with a cartoon Varda in profile. Her eye is a plastic googly one, and her nose is made of a thin silver chain. On the bottom is written: ‘Instructions: hold the card horizontally while gently shaking it.’ When you shake it, the chain moves, as if Varda is nodding her head.
What were all of these things? I wondered, choosing Cléo de 5 à 7 from among the smooth DVDs lining the box, cracking open the jewel case, feeding the disc into the machine in the living room. Whose idea was it to cram all that in with the films? They added up to exactly the kind of clutter I militate against in my flat, wary of accumulating too much stuff (read: crap) in a very small space. Yet I was charmed by these trinkets. These charms. I liked to imagine they were replicas of tchotchkes you could find in Varda’s own overstuffed house in the rue Daguerre. Especially the postcards.
Varda and her postcards. If you know a few of Varda’s films, you might have noticed that she has a thing for postcards, tarot cards, playing cards, passport photos, daguerreotypes – any kind of talismanic image. Varda lends them (or in some cases restores to them) an esoteric strangeness. She started out as a photographer, and this is how she got into cinema: images spoke so loudly she had to give them words. Even as a screenwriter and director she has stayed with images; she includes many still photos and paintings in her films, and sometimes reconstitutes them with live actors. There’s a famous shot in her first film, La Pointe Courte (1954), with Philippe Noiret’s and Silvia Monfort’s faces forming a hard right angle to each other, her profile covering half of his face; the camera holds them tightly together for a moment, in black-and-white sculpturality, and, commenting on this image in her autobiography-cum-documentary, The Beaches of Agnès (2008), she announces, seeing cubism reflected there, ‘Braque!’
Postcards are the wanderer’s flare signal, shot up into the dark, an announcement of presence. Postcards have distance built into them. You buy them in one place and send them to another, an emissary from wherever you’re visiting. This is their purpose. We believe in the connection of postcard to place so deeply that the postcard becomes proof that we have been there. Varda uses this subterfuge in her feminist musical film One Sings, the Other Doesn’t (1977); the young Pauline lies to her parents, telling them she needs 20,000 francs to travel with her choir to a festival in Avignon, when in fact the money is to send her friend Suzanne to Switzerland to get an abortion. Pauline goes to a postcard shop in Paris and buys a postcard of Avignon, and somehow gets it sent to her parents from Avignon. Suzanne, meanwhile, pretends to go to Switzerland, but in order to save the money for her bills she has an illegal abortion in Paris instead.
The postcard can make up part of a personal archive, rerouted on its journey from one person to another, becoming a souvenir, or a slender journal, on the back of which we may jot down our impressions of a place only for our own memories, intercepted decades later by a curious grandchild or a stranger at a flea market. Varda collects old postcards of places she has lived, but she only buys them as far away as possible from the places in question. ‘Buying postcards of Noirmoutier in Noirmoutier,’ she writes, ‘where’s the fun in that!’ Where is the fun, then? In a slight rotation. A postcard of New York bought in Paris. A postcard of Paris bought in Tokyo. Last time I was in New York, I bought a necklace with a charm in the shape of New York State. ‘Isn’t that kind of silly?’ my mother said when she saw it. ‘But she’s not going to wear it here,’ my sister said. ‘She’ll wear it in Paris. It will make sense in Paris.’
Some things only make sense out of context.
* * *
Tarot cards are the first image we see in the film. Cléo is waiting for the results of a biopsy and fears the worst; deeply superstitious, she wants to believe in some kind of knowledge beyond that of science. She is out of place from the moment the film begins; she would not otherwise be in a clairvoyant’s office. Something is not right inside of her; this slight displacement inside sets in motion the rest of the film. The tarot reader explains that she is looking for Cléo in the spread: ‘The cards speak better when you appear.’ And she draws a card with a woman on it, standing in a luxurious faux Louis XV drawing room: candelabras and brocade drapes and ornate tables and picture frames. She is a woman of some wealth and social standing. Or else she’s a courtesan.1 She is framed by a velvet curtain, as if she were onstage. But there is no actress card in the tarot deck, and no courtesan card, either. She could be the Empress, signifying feminine power, rebirth, connecting, according to traditional readings of this card, with ‘higher planes of consciousness through nature’. Or she could just as easily represent The World, always depicted by a woman alone, and read to contain promises of travel, of discovery, a sense of closure to the past and the beginning of something new.
The fortune-teller sees a ‘departure, a journey’.
FORTUNE-TELLER
It is difficult to see, we must do another spread.
The second drawin
g contains a surprise: a young man, talkative, amusing. ‘Ah,’ she warns,
FORTUNE-TELLER
… but something is going to go wrong, I see a shock, an upheaval: it’s your disease, which you are taking very seriously.
She cautions Cléo not to exaggerate, take another card, wait and see. The card Cléo draws is Death. She cries out in horror. The fortune-teller reassures her, tells her the card does not necessarily promise death, but rather, a profound transformation. Cléo scatters the cards on the table and says she’s seen enough: the moment they took the blood sample she knew. Though she is genuinely aggrieved, there is something artificial about Cléo’s tears.
The camera tracks her as she walks out of the fortune-teller’s flat, lingering on the transition from inside to outside. There are several flights of stairs, winding down to the street; Varda slows this shot, cut, cut, cut on Cléo’s face. (Jump cuts: the line breaks of cinema.) I pause and re-watch the scene a few times, counting the cuts, trying to understand what is so fascinating about her face moving over and over the screen. I think it’s because of the subtle differences in her face, the emotions playing over it; it’s not the same shot over and over, or if it is, it’s unevenly cut. I never noticed it before, but the film is somehow about these shifts and gaps, what the French call décalages; this really resonates, as someone who lives en décalage.