More importantly, perhaps, all the actors (including French screen greats Jean Rochefort, Bernard Blier and Jean Carmet) are superb, and there’s a strong ’70s Paris ambiance, with plenty of smoking, seduction and witty repartee. It’s just a shame that the city doesn’t inspire new films like it.
Liberté, Égalité, Ciné
Paris doesn’t want films like C’était un Rendez-vous and Le Grand Blond to be forgotten. It wants to educate Parisians about cinema culture, which is why, as well as screening the latest releases, many cinemas also run frequent mini-festivals. They will show the current box-office hits at the same time as having, say, a Cary Grant week, an Almodovar night, or a Suspense cycle. Just days after director Claude Chabrol’s death in September 2010, five cinemas got together to organize a twenty-film retrospective.
The city has also created its own institution to make sure that film-lovers get a varied, balanced diet. Deep down in Les Halles, in a subterranean plaza a few dozen metres from one of Paris’s biggest multiplexes, sits the Forum des Images, a film library and five-screen cinema financed by Mission Cinéma. The Forum shows classics, new independent films and obscure foreign productions from countries you didn’t even know had a movie industry. It also has a direct educational role, inviting in school groups—a recent ‘children’s programme’ included a movie by New Wave director François Truffaut. They start them young in Paris.
The Forum has a library of over 7,000 films, the oldest dating back to 1895, and cinéphiles can either go along to one of the showings advertised in the listings magazines or simply decide to nip underground and ask for a private screening of anything in the catalogue. The Salle des Collections has individual screens, sofas where two can snuggle up to watch a love story (though even in Paris there are limits on the degree of snuggling allowed) and small salons where up to seven people can gather for a collective movie experience. And in the evenings after 7.30 p.m., it’s free. Yes, Paris provides legal video piracy—with comfy sofas.
* These are fees per working day. In true French administrative style, Paris City Hall considers that films should be shot from nine to five, Monday to Saturday. Overtime costs 85 euros an hour, and Sundays, holidays and nights are 50 per cent extra. Some locations require the hire of a city worker, un agent de la ville, who will be paid 31 euros an hour overtime if a shoot overshoots.
** Note to self: get contract to add glass bubble to top of Eiffel Tower so it looks like a giant thermometer, and make fortune.
The Italian painting section of the Louvre, back in the good old days when you could actually get quite close to the Mona Lisa. But it is possible to see great art in Paris without fighting the crowds.
11
ART
Le fou copie l’artiste. L’artiste ressemble au fou.
(The madman copies the artist. The artist looks like a madman.)
ANDRÉ MALRAUX, WRITER AND
FORMER FRENCH MINISTER OF CULTURE
What’s Louvre got to do with it?
PARIS IS the spiritual home of Impressionism and Cubism and has played host to pretty well every other artistic -ism. It was the city where Picasso blossomed from a gifted teenager to a modernist giant and where Van Gogh turned himself from a gloomy Dutchman into a frenzied Frenchman. Before the First World War, it was practically impossible to sit in a Parisian café without being offered a cheap portrait by a future genius for the price of a glass of absinthe. In short, Paris is so arty that even Mona Lisa has set up residence here.
Well, that’s the image that the city likes to project. And there are artists and galleries everywhere, doing their best to convince us all that the art scene is as vibrant as it was between the 1870s and the 1920s, when Monet, Manet, Morisot, Matisse, Modigliani and co. were painting so productively that Paris seemed in danger of being overrun with barely dry canvases. In fact, though, it’s largely a myth—those good old days weren’t really so good at all. In their early careers, almost all the city’s most famous artists of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries were ignored or shouted down by Parisians.
When Gustave Courbet first began exhibiting his paintings in Paris in the early 1850s, for instance, his attempts at realism shocked the public and critics alike. They wanted art that depicted princes and heroes, re-enactments of legends or historical scenes, and Courbet was offering them just plain people—not graceful or godlike, but merely human. His 1853 painting Les Baigneuses (The Bathers) features one fat lady getting out of a river or lake, and another taking her stockings off ready for a dip. People were aghast at the tastelessness of the nude bather’s fleshy buttocks and at the mud on the other woman’s bare foot, which was interpreted as a symbol of immorality. The mud didn’t symbolize anything, though—according to Courbet, it was plain old riverbank silt, and people weren’t used to such literalism.
Others, including Édouard Manet, followed Courbet’s realist lead, and had the doors of the artistic establishment firmly slammed in their faces. In 1863, so many artists were refused permission to exhibit their paintings at Paris’s annual art fair, Le Salon, that they set up an alternative show, Le Salon des Refusés, with the blessing of Emperor Napoleon III, who agreed that the public should be allowed to decide what they liked. They did just that—the show was a total flop, and the critics had a field day. One called the paintings ‘sad and grotesque’, but added that ‘with one or two exceptions, you laugh as heartily as at a farce at the Palais-Royal’ (home of the Comédie Française).
Fifteen years later, the critics were even more horrified. A young man called Claude Monet, who had been invalided out of the army after catching typhoid, began expressing his relief at
