Collecting Views and Visions of the City: Episode Films, Paris vu par… , and “Postcard Cinema”

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Notes

1. Benjamin's uncompleted “Passagen-Werk” was published in 1982, 42 years after the author's death. Titled Das Passagen-werk, Gesammelte Schriften Vol. 5, this monumental text is better known in the English-speaking world as the Arcades Project. An English-language version, translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, was made available in 1999; it is to this version, The Arcades Project, that all references and citations related to Benjamin's work are made.

2. Kaufman later shot Jean Vigo's masterpiece L'Atalante (1934), a film that, like Paris vu par…, denies the spectator the conventional view of Paris as seen from the top of the Eiffel Tower (a 360-degree panoramic shot that producer Jacques–Louis Nounez requested, but Vigo refused). For an exploration of this and other non-documentary films' cartographic reconceptualization of the city, see Tom Conley's Le Cinéaste de la Vie Moderne.

3. The film, for which the total production cost was roughly $100,000, was blown up to 35 mm for distribution (Anon. 1965). An earlier article in Variety (May 12, 1965) reports that Schroeder received governmental dispensations and “that the total production cost was about same as a 30-minute short, which would be between $10,000 to $15,000.”

4. Paris, je t'aime is an ambitious project, overseen by the French film producer Emmanuel Benbihy, that consists of 18 episodes set in different administrative districts of France's capital city.

5. According to Schor, “the first official postcard was printed by the Austrian Government in 1869” (1994, 261).

6. As one contemporary journalist gushed,

“The triumph of the Post Card is once again the 1900 Exhibition. It was reproduced a thousand ways, embellished, overloaded with all the fantastic luxury of the most perfect bad taste: sites, types, unknown corners, overviews, costumes, perspectives, architecture, all topics, all points of view on the huge international exhibition were exhausted.” (Schor, 264–5)

7. In a review of the omnibus film Istanbul Tales, João Antunes states that this Turkish feature “is as far as possible from a tourist postcard kind of a movie.” Instead, the film “portrays the genuine breath of a city” (2005, 7), as if it were a living organism.

8. A short list of Hollywood and European productions, including such works as Paris Qui Dort (1925), Ninotchka (1939), Monsieur Verdoux (1947), Funny Face (1957), Zazie Dans le Metro (1960), The Great Race (1965), Brigitte et Brigitte (1966), Le Joli Mai (1963), Caprice (1967), and A View to a Kill (1985), demonstrates how easily the Eiffel Tower's iconicity can be bent to fit the demands of various genres, from romances in which it functions as rendezvous point or “photo-op” spot to action films in which it serves as a backdrop for shootouts and chases, not to mention as a helicopter landing zone.

9. Schor continues by saying that Haussmannization “widened not only the gulf between the beaux quartiers and the teeming ghettoes of the dangerous classes, but also… the gap between the bourgeois spectator–flâneur and both the bourgeois woman and the worker whose access to metropolitan life was severely limited….” (265–6).

10. John Ardagh refers to the “Champs Élyséefication” of St. Germain des Prés: “Later it became accepted as part of the landscape. But now it has been supplanted in its turn by Giorgio Armani, who in 1998 opened an emporio on the site, largest of his trendy fashion shops around the world” (2000, 302).

11. Another film released the same year as Paris vu par… showed much greater fidelity to the travelogue; titled Grand Tour of London and Paris (By Day and By Night) (1965), this documentary film—produced, directed, edited and written by André De La Varre, Jr.—is hosted by a travel guide who spends half of the film illustrating such “delights” as the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame, the Latin Quarter, the Arc de Triomphe, the Champs-Elysées, the Seine, Montmartre, and the Metro.

12. A similar instance of this occurs in Nanni Loy's contemporaneous Made in Italy (1965), an anthology film whose most memorable segment stars Anna Magnani as a frustrated mother trying to herd her terrified husband, geriatric in-law, and three children across a busy intersection in Rome.

13. This recalls a shot in the previous episode showing the prostitute scanning the newspaper, which contains several stories (“Hold–Up Goes Wrong,” “Mystical Madness at St. Nazaire,”, and “Racing Horses Stolen in Paris” are just a few that are mentioned).

14. This cultural tradition and its milieu, famously reflected in Ernest Hemingway's 1926 The Sun Also Rises, was inherited by directors associated with the Nouvelle Vague (in addiiotn to Godard's work, the neighborhood appears in François Truffaut's Jules et Jim [1962] and Agnes Varda's Cleo from 5 to 7 [Cléo de Cinq à Sept; 1962], to name just two examples).

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David Scott Diffrient

David Scott Diffrient is the William E. Morgan Endowed Chair of Liberal Arts and Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies in the Department of Communication Studies at Colorado State University. His articles have been published in Cinema Journal, Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television, Journal of Fandom Studies, Journal of Film and Video, Journal of Popular Film and Television, New Review of Film and Television Studies, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, and Post Script, as well as in several edited collections about film and television topics. His most recent books are Omnibus Films: Theorizing Transauthorial Cinema (Edinburgh University Press, 2014) and Movie Migrations: Transnational Genre Flows and South Korean Cinema (Rutgers University Press, 2015), co-authored with Hye Seung Chung. He is the co-editor of the Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema.