Flâneuse

by Lauren Elkin

  4    Sophie Calle, ‘Filatures parisiennes’, M’as-tu Vue, ed. Christine Macel, Paris, Centre Pompidou: Xavier Barral, 2003, p. 66.

  5    The two published versions of Suite Vénitienne I’ve seen, in French and in English, give the dates as February 1980, so I am following suit with my citations, but other accounts of the story give 1979 as the year she followed Henri B. to Venice, and I tend to think they are more accurate. Calle has explicitly said she went to Venice before she did The Sleepers, in which she invited random people to sleep in her bed, and that project definitely took place in April 1979. What’s more, she had to go back to Venice to retake many of the photographs, so this may have been undertaken in 1980, and perhaps she changed the date in the published version of the project as a result.

  6    Ibid., p. 8.

  7    Sophie Calle, Suite Vénitienne, trans. Dany Barash and Danny Hatfield, Seattle: Bay Press, 1988, pp. 6–7.

  8    Ibid., p. 20.

  9    Also, that’s no way to learn a foreign language.

  10  Suite Vénitienne, p. 26.

  11  Ibid., p. 30.

  12  Ibid., p. 38.

  13  Ibid.

  14  And one of the projects that followed this one would in fact be set in a hotel: while following Henri B., she began to dream about sleeping in his hotel bed. So in 1981, in the project that would become The Hotel, she got a job as a chambermaid at his hotel, the Casa de Stefani, and while she was cleaning each room, she took pictures of its occupants’ belongings, cataloguing them, guessing what kind of people they were.

  15  Suite Vénitienne, p. 34.

  16  Not long ago a friend told me about a Twitter account possibly belonging to Calle. Maybe it’s hers, maybe it isn’t, but whoever runs it has only posted once: ‘Sophie Calle is ready to follow you.’

  17  Suite Vénitienne, p. 10.

  18  Ibid., p. 50.

  19  Jill Magid interviews Sophie Calle, Tokion, Fall 2008, pp. 46–53.

  TOKYO, INSIDE

  1    Coincidentally, Paris’s Little Japan is on the rue Sainte-Anne near the Louvre. Perhaps Anne is the patron saint of Japanese people in Paris.

  2    That is, the kind of collage poem Tristan Tzara probably can’t be said to have invented; likely he just codified it. His instructions:

  Take a newspaper.

  Take some scissors.

  Choose from this paper an article the length you want to make your poem.

  Cut out the article.

  Next carefully cut out each of the words that make up this article and put them all in a bag.

  Shake gently.

  Next take out each cutting one after the other.

  Copy conscientiously in the order in which they left the bag.

  The poem will resemble you.

  And there you are – an infinitely original author of charming sensibility, even though unappreciated by the vulgar herd.

  –Tristan Tzara, ‘How to Make a Dadaist Poem’, 1920.

  3    Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs, trans. Richard Howard, New York: Hill and Wang, 1982, p. 36.

  4    Only occasionally does kawaii get turned back against itself. I recently saw a picture of Yuko Yamaguchi, who designs for Hello Kitty, her hair dyed a strange orange and in two high buns on either side of her head, painted-on freckles and red circles of rouge on her cheeks, wearing some kind of pinafore and giving the kawaii sign with two fingers. Cute, on her, looks grotesque, subversive.

  5    The katakana seem to be more angular versions of hiragana, and while hiragana are used to spell out Japanese words that lack kanji, katakana transliterate foreign words into Japanese.

  6    Virginia Woolf, notes for ‘Professions for Women’, The Pargiters, p. 164.

  7    Ponyo ponyo, a little fish child / she comes from the ocean blue.

  8    Apparently a Japanese onomatopoeia for ‘kiss and hug!’

  9    So many films about cities are shorts. As if the form were more appropriate to the rhythm of the city. Missed connections. Anecdotes on the subway. City mythologies are built out of fragments.

  10  M’as-tu Vue, p. 364.

  11  Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse (1977), trans. Richard Howard, London: Vintage, 2002.

  PARIS, PROTEST

  1    In Gustave Flaubert’s 1869 novel Sentimental Education, Frédéric Moreau encounters the revolution on his way to visit his mistress, and we are treated to a bit of what it felt like to be surrounded by, though not actually part of, the action. There are men with muskets and swords. Drums beating. People singing the Marseillaise. Fighting on the Right Bank. People running every which way, with great purpose. ‘Everybody was in high spirits; people were strolling about, and the fairy-lights on every floor made it as bright as day. The soldiers were slowly returning to their barracks, looking harassed and unhappy. […] A vague mass of people was swarming about below; here and there in its midst bayonets gleamed white against the dark background. A great din arose. The crowd was too thick for them to make their way straight back; and they were turning into the Rue Caumartin when, all of a sudden, there was a crackling noise behind them like the sound of a huge piece of silk being ripped in two. It was the fusillade on the Boulevard des Capucines. “Ah! They’re killing off a few bourgeois,” said Frédéric calmly.’ Trans. Robert Baldick, Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1964, pp. 281, 282–3.

  2    To Augustine Brault, 5 March 1848, Correspondance, Vol. 8, p. 319. Guizot had been education minister and then prime minister under Louis Philippe; Lamartine was a great French poet and statesman. She had surrounded herself with men so prominent métro stops and streets and boulevards have been named for them. Quoted in Elizabeth Harlan, George Sand, New Heaven: Yale University Press, 2005.

  3    Correspondance, 20 May 1848.

  4    Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, New York: Belknap Press, 2002, p. 243.

  5    Bulletins de la République (Paris, 1848), pp. 23–4. Quoted in Jack.

  6    Tocqueville, Souvenirs (Paris, 1893), pp. 209–11. Quoted in Jack.

  7    Théorie des Quatre Mouvements (1808), Oeuvres Complètes, 1841–5, p. 43. Quoted in Rowbotham.

  8    Sentimental Education, p. 298.

  9    Ibid., p. 292.

  10  ‘I detest politics in the conventional sense,’ she wrote to Hortense Allart; ‘I find it to be a school of rigidity, ingratitude, suspicion and falseness […] Let us leave politics and therefore men to deal with one another as best they can.’

  11  To Armand Barbès, in the Vincennes prison, 10 June 1848, from Nohant, Correspondance, Vol. 8, p. 437.

  12  Bertrand Tilier, ‘“De la balade à la manif”: La représentation picturale de la foule dans les rues de Paris après 1871’, Sociétés et représentations, 17:1 (2004), pp. 87–98.

  13  Letter to Flaubert, 15 January 1867, Correspondance, Vol. 20, p. 297.

  14  The minister retorted something along the lines of: ‘Well, with your face, you probably don’t have to worry about things like that.’

  15  Antonio Quattrocchi and Tom Nairn, The Beginning of the End, Panther Books, 1968 (rpr. London: Verso, 1998), p. 8.

  16  Ibid., p. 46.

  17  Mavis Gallant, Paris Notebooks: Essays & Reviews, New York: Random House, 1988, p. 41.

  18  Ibid.

  19  But where are the young women? The accounts of the time are always male, and our fantasies of it are male as well. Olivier Assayas’s Après mai (2012), Philippe Garrel’s Les amants réguliers (2005) – there’s Louis Garrel again. Bertolucci has gorgeous Eva Green chaining herself to the gates of the Cinémathèque in The Dreamers (2003), cigarette dangling from red lips, chest heaving. But the film is solidly from Michael Pitt’s perspective; Eva’s there as temptat
ion, as problem. What about the girls? What were they doing, thinking, hoping? The only female account I can find – besides Gallant’s – is Jill Neville’s The Love Germ.

  20  Paris Notebooks, p. 12.

  21  Sentimental Education, p. 293.

  22  Sentimental Education, p. 300.

  23  Paris Notebooks, p. 22.

  24  Ibid., p. 42.

  25  Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. 12.

  26  Jane Marcus, ‘Storming the Toolshed’, Art & Anger: Reading Like a Woman, Columbus: Ohio State University, 1988, p. 183.

  27  As I write this, on a chilly October morning, thousands of French high school students are protesting in the streets over the deportation of two immigrant students from France. Leonarda, fifteen, was pulled off her school bus and sent back to Kosovo along with her family, and Khatchik, nineteen, was sent back to Armenia to do his military service. Yesterday, about twenty schools in Paris were occupied by students who built barricades and refused to let anyone inside. ‘Education: no borders,’ they scrawled on sheets, and they shouted ‘Solidarité!’ as they marched from Bastille to Nation. Some wore Guy Fawkes masks.

  28  Paris Notebooks, p. 33.

  29  Philippe Bilger, ‘Philippe Bilger: pourquoi je ne participe pas à «la marche républicaine»’, Le Figaro, 11 January 2015.

  PARIS, NEIGHBOURHOOD

  1    Cléo de 5 à 7: the title carries with it a whiff of the louche, with its reference to the hour of the racy rendez-vous, the cinq à sept, after work and before dinner. It’s a slice of the day when one can slip off and do something just for oneself. Something naughty in a hotel with someone to whom one isn’t married. The film was called, at first, La Petite Fille. But the actress playing Cléo, Corinne Marchand, saw something else in her, and directed Varda towards les grandes horizontales like Liane de Pougy or Cléo de Mérode. ‘The hour of the “rendez-vous galants” imposed itself,’ Varda recalls. (Varda par Agnès, Paris: Editions du Cahier du cinéma, 1994, p. 31.)

  2    The film makes us complicit with these people in the cafés, the people in the street, everyone who watches Cléo; just as she’s a pop star to them, she’s the star of a film to us. As she walks out of the fortune-teller’s building and down the rue de Rivoli, we watch her from above. The street is full of suits on racks, as it still is today, in certain parts; men approach her trying to sell her a dress. Another says, So, shall we walk together?

  3    ‘Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography’, in Ken Knabb, ed., Situationist International Anthology, Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981, p. 5.

  4    Species of Spaces, ed. and trans. John Sturrock, London: Penguin, 2008, pp. 58–9.

  5    And if the hospitals can’t cure you, well, the 14th isn’t a bad place to end up for eternity. In my walks, I discovered the wonderful Montparnasse cemetery, very close to the rue Daguerre, where you can find the graves of Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir (who used to live nearby in the avenue Victor Schœlcher), Jean Baudrillard, Robert Desnos, Marguerite Duras, Emile Durkheim, Léon-Paul Fargue, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Henri Langlois, Pierre Louÿs and Guy de Maupassant, not to mention Albert Dreyfus, Philippe Noiret, Eric Rohmer, Jean Seberg, Louis Vierne, Susan Sontag and Tristan Tzara. (You can keep your Père Lachaise, I thought. This is where I want to live when I’m dead. On that shelf, with those people.) Demy is buried there too. And one day, Varda says, so will she be, ‘ten flaps of a crow’s wings between our house and our final resting place’.

  6    The song, ‘Sans Toi’, homophonically prefigures Varda’s 1985 film Sans toit ni loi, literally ‘Without Roof or Law’, but shown in English under the title Vagabond. Varda’s synopsis of that film: ‘Dirty, grumpy girl goes for a long, furious walk and dies in a ditch’ (Gaby Wood, ‘Agnès Varda interview: The whole world was sexist!’ Telegraph, 22 May 2015).

  7    Dorothée manages to break Cléo of a little of her superstition: at one point she drops her purse down the stairs and everything falls out. Her mirror breaks. Cléo freaks out about the bad luck to come. Dorothée says, ‘You mustn’t worry about such things, breaking a mirror is like breaking a plate.’

  8    Madonna wanted to do a remake of Cléo, maybe set in downtown New York, with the central character worried she has AIDS, the soldier off to fight in Iraq. Varda writes: ‘I imagine showing Madonna how to walk down a stairway, when she walks down one in every show she does! That would be funny.’ (Varda par Agnès, p. 60).

  9    Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987, p. 23.

  10  Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard, New York: Hill and Wang, 1981, p. 96.

  11  ‘… je crois que le décor nous habite, nous dirige.’ Interview with Jean Michaud and Raymond Bellour, Cinéma 61, no. 60, October, pp. 4–20. Cited in Alison Smith, Agnès Varda, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998, p. 60.

  12  Quoted in Calvin Tompkins, Duchamp: A Biography, New York: Henry Holt, 1998, p. 247.

  13  Phil Powrie, ‘Heterotopic Spaces and Nomadic Gazes in Varda: From Cléo de 5 à 7 to Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse’, L’Esprit Créateur, Vol. 51, No. 1 (2011), pp. 68–82, 69.

  EVERYWHERE, THE VIEW FROM THE GROUND

  1    Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, New York: FSG, 2003, p. 22.

  2    Caroline Moorehead, Martha Gellhorn: A Life, New York: Random House, 2011, p. 19.

  3    Letter to Campbell Beckett, 29 April 1934, Martha Gellhorn, p. 23.

  4    Letter to Stanley Pennell, 19 May 1931, Letters, p. 12.

  5    Cited in Moorehead, p. 3.

  6    To Victoria Glendinning, 30 September 1987, Letters, p. 468.

  7    Martha Gellhorn, The Face of War, London: Virago, 1986, p. 89.

  8    Lorna Scott Fox, ‘No Intention of Retreating’, London Review of Books, 26:17, 2 September 2004, pp. 26–8.

  9    The Face of War, p. xiii.

  10  Letter to Betty Barnes, 30 January 1937, Letters, p. 47.

  11  The Face of War, pp. 20–1.

  12  Ibid., p. 21.

  13  ‘High Explosive for Everyone’, The Face of War, p. 23.

  14  The Face of War, pp. 35–6.

  15  Ibid., p. 24.

  16  Ibid., p. 25.

  17  Ibid.

  18  Ibid., pp. 26–7.

  19  Letters, p. 74.

  20  Ibid.

  21  For example, the first line of her essay ‘Messing About in Boats’: ‘During that terrible year, 1942, I lived in the sun, safe and comfortable and hating it.’ Travels with Myself and Another, n.p.

  22  Martha Gellhorn: A Life, p. 125.

  23  ‘The Besieged City’, The Face of War, p. 40.

  24  Quoted in Richard Whelan, Robert Capa: A Biography, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994, p. 275.

  25  The Face of War, p. 34.

  26  Ibid., p. 33.

  27  Letters, p. 158.

  28  Ibid.

  29  ‘Chronicling Poverty with Compassion and Rage’, New Yorker, 17 January 2013.

  30  ‘Justice at Night’, Spectator, 20 August 1936, repr. The View From the Ground, New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1988, pp. 8, 9.

  31  Martha Gellhorn: A Life, p. 112.

  32  The Face of War, p. 21. Even as a traveller, she described herself as ‘amateur’ rather than ‘heroic’. ‘We can’t all be […] Freya Stark,’ she wrote in her preface to her 1978 collection of travel writings, Travels With Myself and Another.

  33  ‘Martha Without Ernest’, Times Literary Supplement, 16 January 2013. Gellhorn’s editor, Max Perkins, thought the title was too bleak, Gellhorn lost her nerve, and the novel was published under the title Wine of Astonishment. In the intervening yea
rs, the technical term ‘point of no return’ passed into everyday language, yet for Gellhorn, ‘the words stand as they did when I first heard them; an instruction to men at war, a statement of finality’. In the 1988 reissue, she reclaimed her original title.

  34  Point of No Return, Lincoln, NE: Bison Books, 1995, Afterword, p. 327.

  35  Ibid., p. 330.

  36  Ibid.

  37  Ibid., p. 292.

  38  Martha Gellhorn: A Life, p. 221.

  39  Martha Gellhorn, Liana (1944), London: Picador, 1993, p. 91.

  40  Ibid., p. 90.