With its World’s Fairs, boulevards lined with street lights, and shopping arcades, Paris had become the epitome of urban modernity and an international meeting place for the literary, musical, artistic, and cinematic avant-gardes. Paris was not only the city where Marinetti published the first Futurist Manifesto (1909) and James Joyce published Ulysses (1922), it also became the location and subject of several city symphonies.1 Apart from Cavalcanti’s Rien que les heures (1926), films by Marcel Carné, Henri Chomette, Lucie Derain, Eugène Deslaw, Joris Ivens, Boris Kaufman, Georges Lacombe, and André Sauvage among others documented the spaces and inhabitants of the city.
Most of these filmmakers were part of the French film avant-garde, which is often associated with swift editing, unusual points of view, and a non-narrative film form preoccupied with the play of light and optical sensations, rhythm, movement, variations in speed (slow motion, time lapses), and abstract shapes evoking a cinéma pur.2 Several artists connected these ideas of a pure cinema with the optical effects of motorized traffic and urban space. However, city symphonies often undermine this notion of aesthetic purity as their subjects were entrenched in reality. Given this perspective, Henri Chomette’s Jeux des reflets et de la vitesse (1925) is a documentary on the Paris railways and waterways as well as a kinetic study of speed and moving light. As in his Cinq minutes de cinéma pur (1926), Chomette opens his film with images of geometric figures and reflections. In the second part of the film, the city is presented as a stage of spinning movements, speed, and light effects as well as contrasts between backgrounds and surfaces, shadows and reflections, and sky and water. At the end of the film, the Eiffel tower is tilted in a dizzying swing, the camera is mounted under a train, and bridges and rails merge in a dynamic montage.
In so doing, Chomette demonstrates how the body of modern man is exposed to the sensory stimuli of the metropolis—a topic that is also crucial in Eugène Deslaw’s Les Nuits électriques (1928), in which the electrified and wired city becomes an attraction for the crowds gathering in front of illuminated shop windows and glittering amusement halls. Shot in Berlin and Paris, Deslaw’s film turns the nocturnal city, with its pulsating spectacle of machines and artificial light, into a vitalist flux. In his comment on Walter Benjamin’s 1929 Vogue article entitled “Paris, la ville dans le miroir,” Patrice Rollet aptly noted the interconnections between city and film, referring to the visual experiences they have in common.
Whether filmed or not, the city reigns. The city determines the cinema from one side to the other… . From the 1920s onwards, the avant-gardes exchanged the city for the flashing of its signs or its jeux de reflets et de vitesse; Paris escapes us. Because it has become cinema itself. Light and movement. Trace et défilement. Espace quelconque.3
Rollet does not only explicitly refer to Chomette’s film and cinéma pur, he also touches upon the similarities between film and city by means of an implicit reference to the Deleuzian notion of an “espace quelconque.”4 This “anyspace whatsoever” marks quite a few city films of the Paris avant-garde, as their close ups, framings, and montage result in spatial disconnection and discontinuity.
This is illustrated, for instance, by the 20-minute documentary Les Halles (1927) by Boris Kaufman and André Galitzine, which opens with the nocturnal darkness of the periphery, its depths illuminated by swiftly shifting car lights. In the following shots, delivery trucks and horse-drawn carriages appear one by one in the beams of headlights, disconnected from urban space. Next, the film shows how heavy jute bags and filled baskets are unloaded from freight wagons, focusing on the gestures of the laborers. The subtle encounter between man and machine emphasizes different rhythms and technologies and it structures the entire film. It marks not only the opening sequence, set in the nocturnal interior of the market, but also the latter parts of the film, which take us outside the market halls of glass, cast iron, and steel in the light of dawn. As in Émile Zola’s 1873 novel Le Ventre de Paris or “The Belly of Paris,” Kaufman and Galitzine present the awakening city as defined by a tension between old and new forms of urban organization, visualized by the contrasts between birds’ eye views of motorized traffic and swarming crowds on the one hand, and portraits of individual retailers with handcarts, day laborers, and gleaners on the other. Finally, an accelerated montage of garbage trucks and sweepers indicates the rapid transition to the busy day. Following François Albéra, cultural historian Myriam Juan sees this debut film by Dziga Vertov’s youngest brother as merely a montage of picturesque shots, lacking the avant-garde characteristics of modern speed and mechanics.5 Nonetheless, Juan discerns elements of an avant-garde aesthetic in some of the framings. In the film’s opening sequence, Kaufman evokes the hectic rhythm of the modern metropolis. In later parts of the film, his montage and shot compositions develop a simultaneity of different styles and optical paradigms. Rendered in low-angles, the shots of facades and columns evoke a constructivist and high-modernist style, which also marks the shots of the flow of pedestrians at the subway entrances. These human flows point to another part of the urban “body” and they show, through a montage of contrasting movements, the intense hustle and bustle around Les Halles. By means of shot compositions and editing, Kaufman and Galitzine develop a rhythm, which is first and foremost determined by the gestures, gazes, and pace of men at work. The film adopts the gaze of the flâneur or a “moving photograph,” as Victor Fournel, a contemporary of Baudelaire, puts it: a vision “with all its changing reflections, the flow of things, the city’s movements, the multiple physiognomy of public attitudes.”6 In so doing, quite “marginal” films such as Les Halles and other Paris symphonic films question established categories such as cinéma pur, modernism, constructivism, and Neue Sachlichkeit, blending these aesthetic concepts with a form of experimental documentary cinema. Many little-known “minor” Paris films eschew the conventional opposition between “documentary” and “abstract” cinema.
Water seems to be a recurrent motif in many 1920s avant-garde films on Paris. This not only relates to the topographical situation of a city bordering the river Seine and three canals, it also offers aesthetic possibilities as a light reflecting substance. Harmonies de Paris (1928) by Lucie Derain, for instance, is frequently punctuated by abstract images of reflecting water surfaces. Likewise, in Marcel Carné’s Nogent: Eldorado du Dimanche (1929), the camera repeatedly moves along the Marne riverbank in order to capture, in tilted framings, the contrasting structures of reflecting waves and reed. Prosper Hillairet and Dominique Païni among others have emphasized the crucial role of water as a flux, which tallies with modernism’s fascination for movement and speed as well as with the principles of the film medium. 7 Given this perspective, the role of water can be compared with the play of urban reflections in the aforementioned films by Henri Chomette, who demonstrated that film is “not restricted to a representative mode.”8
Études sur Paris (1928) by André Sauvage is also determined by the traffic route of the river but develops this more elaborately. Using surprising angles and selecting unusual motifs, Sauvage takes a subjective approach that triggered the praise of the Surrealists.9 Produced by Sauvage himself, this documentary film offers a mobile vision on the city, which does not so much evoke the frenzy of modern speed but rather a personal exploration of the topography of Paris through its waterways. By means of a series of short sequences, Études sur Paris focuses on the everyday activities of boatmen, their gestures contributing to a filmic study of a flow of movements. Intertitles enable us to situate the islands, bridges, and locks on an imaginary city map or they connect the various travel distances to one another.
The movements of the boats on the river and the canals continue on land with cars, subways, and public elevators. Eventually, the camera is mobilized independently: famous monuments and Haussmann’s buildings are captured by circular movements and horizontal and vertical panning shots. The movements are modulated by short, static, and carefully composed shots, giving the impression of a constantly changing glissade. The montage emphasizes the variation of speeds, juxtaposing motorized vehicles with other means of transport running on human or animal power: cars, busses, trains, and tramways are alternated with coaches, child carriages, handcarts, as well as pedestrians and horses.
In the underground waterways, Sauvage emphasizes the dynamic interplay of oblique light beams and passing vessels. Aesthetically, the waterways are reminiscent of the documentary attractions of early cinema, in particular the phantom rides as Dominique Païni has noticed.10 Gilles Deleuze interprets the predilection for water of the French avant-garde as the promise of an extended human perception.11 For Deleuze, such films leave behind the solid matter of space as a “molar” environment in order to discover in liquid forms a finer, further, “molecular” perception, which corresponds to Vertov’s “kino-eye.”12 Performing this contrast, the rhythm of the shots of the waterways in Études sur Paris follows a logic opposed to the arrangements of the city scenes: while views of the riverbank and short scenes on the quays punctuate the filmic flow, the movements on land create a connection between important urban places.
A topographical approach of the 1920s Paris city films also offers the possibility to investigate different forms of spatial representation of the city. In this context, Michel de Certeau’s concept of urban space seen from the perspective of the walker is useful. Crucial for de Certeau is the urbanite’s walk as an “art of ‘diverting’ itineraries” in the sense of “turning” phrases.13 In The Practice of Everyday Life, de Certeau distinguishes two forms to narrate space: one designs a route indicated by the direction that should be followed to reach a certain destination; the other resembles a map showing the places next to each other.14 Georges Lacombe’s La Zone: Au pays des chiffoniers (1928), which was produced by Charles Dullin, can be analyzed according to De Certeau’s distinction in the sense that it resolutely presents the city from the perspective of the walker but not that of the flâneur.15 Instead of detached observers, the Paris rag-pickers are portrayed as a sub-proletarian class, working fixed hours from morning to night. The film opens with an animation of a city map, which is measured by a large needle in a clockwise direction. With these circular movements, the dynamic spatial lay-out of the city is presented as a temporal function, which corresponds to the paths of the rag-pickers, who travel from the miserable quarters in the urban fringes into the city center, thus also presenting the film’s structure.
Early in the morning, before the city awakens, rag-pickers start searching garbage cans of wealthy neighborhoods for paper, cardboard, or glass. They move the collected materials through the urban center, hurrying past places where other urbanites use motorized vehicles, and bringing them into “the Zone,” where the division of the garbage takes place. Juxtaposing their manual labor to mechanical forms of waste collection and recycling, the film shows that the rag-pickers perform a very precise kind of manual labor that answers to the modern organization of transport, separation, and processing of waste. In a dynamic sequence, La Zone presents the chiffonniers as urbanites who are perfectly adapted to the rhythms and spaces of the metropolis. Intertitles situate the transports in the morning and in a sequence of several minutes, they are visualized as a speedy route through the city, undertaken by a group of two men and two women by foot with a heavily loaded handcart.
With its interest in the suburbs, Lacombe’s film is an exception that shows more affinities with photographic works by André Kertézs or Germaine Krull than with other Paris city symphonies, which often include footage of famous sites and viewpoints. In her account of 1920s documentary films on Paris, Myriam Juan emphasizes the symbolical dimension of shots of urban monuments.16 Films such as Lucie Derain’s Harmonies de Paris (1928), in which an entire sequence is entitled “The Stone Lace of the Monuments of Paris,” foreground the commemorative function of these buildings, which is also underscored visually by means of framing, viewpoints, and linear movements. Following Evelyne Cohen, Juan demonstrates in which way this film recurs to a “mental geography,” constructed out of images of memorial sites.17 Jacques Aumont calls Derain’s film “pseudo-modern.” Comparing the film unfavorably with Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin (1927), he states that cameraman Nicolas Rudakov’s work was already outdated in 1928 and that Derain rather imitates the avant-garde. As an example, Aumont refers to a high-angle shot of an intersection showing the pavement and glittering tram rails.18 Though somewhat more nuanced, David Robinson, too, criticizes Derain’s montage and shot compositions as conventional, especially the use of short cuts, fades, and distortions, but he praises Rudakov’s striking framings and sinuously moving camera.19
In many films of the era, high-angle shots are used to display the act of seeing itself. In addition, they expand the gaze of the pedestrian and enable us to situate it almost cartographically. Eugène Deslaw’s Montparnasse (1928), for instance, opens with a high-angle shot of a traffic intersection, introducing a dynamic montage of tilted shots of streets, traffic lights, lively sidewalks, and boulevards, organized according to opposite diagonals. Deslaw explores and analyzes the movements of the bustle of the metropolis not unlike Joris Ivens in his short film Études de mouvements à Paris (1927), which consists first and foremost of low-angle shots of Paris traffic intersections between the Louvre and the Place de la Concorde. Taken from amidst the hustle of pedestrians, Ivens’s footage evokes the perception of the moving body of a flâneur.
Several shots resemble the compositions of photographers of the day, in particularly the work of Germaine Krull. At the time, both artists were not only united in a paper marriage, they interacted also artistically.20 Comprising shots of speeding cars in oblique angles, Ivens’s 1927 film shares formal similarities with Krull’s 1928 photograph entitled Paris, vue en plongée. Likewise, Krull’s picture entitled Trafic à Paris (1926), showing a car driver in the middle of traffic, is reminiscent of a shot in Ivens’s film. A comparison between Ivens and Krull, who published the landmark urban photography book 100 x Paris in 1929, makes apparent their common interests as well as the differences between film and photography, between “une image moyenne” (Deleuze) taken from the flux of movement of the film and the decisive moment of a snapshot.21
This dialectic between the filmic and photographic image also marks Deslaw’s Montparnasse (1928), which is not only characterized by a predilection for movement but also by an interest in images of stasis. Including references to art galleries in his cinematic survey of the famous Paris neighborhood, Deslaw creates a kind of cinematic paragone, a comparison between various artistic disciplines not unlike Ricciotto Canudo, who labeled film as the “Seventh Art.”22 In Montparnasse, shots of shop windows, photographs, objects, paintings, and books are integrated in a dynamic view on the city. With this serial configuration of display devices, the film presents itself as a montage of images, emphasizing the similarities between city and film. In so doing, Deslaw ingeniously invokes a scene from the beginning of Alberto Cavalcanti’s Rien que les heures (1926), which consists of a series of pictorial representations of Paris, thus juxtaposing film, the art form capable of representing life through a sequence of images, with painting. This high level of self-reflection is also visible in the opening credits of Cavalcanti’s film. A shot of fashionable people descending a staircase suddenly halts and the frozen image is subsequently torn as a photograph, thus emphasizing the importance of stereotypes and preexisting images. The Eiffel tower, too, is presented as a replica and Paris becomes a scale model under a glass bell.
All of the films discussed in this chapter contain passages that meditate on the tension between movement and stasis. Like Dziga Vertov, both Sauvage and Deslaw present shop window mannequins and automatons as tokens of the city’s energy, meanwhile emphasizing film’s aesthetical capabilities to animate objects. By means of the motif of the shop window, the pedestrian is also turned into a flâneur, an urban observer acting as a proxy of the spectator. Such a duplication of the film’s spectator is also included in Carné’s Nogent: Eldorado du Dimanche (1929) that contains a brief scene set on the Marne riverbanks, in which a photographer is at work among Sunday strollers, reminiscent of a similar scene in Menschen am Sonntag by Robert Siodmak and Edgar Ulmer released in the same year. Apart from touching upon the dialectics between filmic and photographic modes, the scene also draws our attention to the importance of spectacle in the modern metropolis. Likewise, Montparnasse comprises a scene with a shadow play as entertainment for visitors of a coffee house. In Les Halles, the cranking cameraman is visible through his shadow. In the films by Kaufman, Deslaw, and Carné as well as the photographs by Germaine Krull and Eli Lotar, images of shadows, photographs, and paintings serve a double ambition. On the one hand, they present the visual possibilities of the cinematic apparatus perfectly adapted to the visual dynamics of the metropolis. On the other hand, they establish a dialogue with the other arts and hence evoke the artistic and intellectual atmosphere of 1920s Paris.
