After having made his La traversée du Grépon (The Crossing of the Grépon, 1924) and Portrait de la Grèce (Portrait of Greece, 1927), writer, painter, photographer, filmmaker, producer, and passionate traveler André Sauvage (1891–1975) made a feature-length portrait of Paris. His ambitions are panoramic and encyclopedic, enumerating almost all aspects of the city, although it should be noted that the film was released in separate parts and that some parts have been screened independently—the Paris-Port sequence, for instance, was shown at the landmark 1929 Film und Foto exhibition in Stuttgart.
Sauvage starts on the city’s outskirts, exploring a landscape gradually getting more industrialized and urbanized before approaching its core. Sauvage’s mode of transport is the slowly moving barge, floating through the northern suburbs, before arriving at the Seine and drifting through Montparnasse and St Germain, out to Montmartre and the city’s edges before wandering back to the center. The film contains footage of the famous Paris monuments, but, first and foremost, it focuses on the everyday spaces and the anonymous urbanites. An elaborate expository travelogue (with intertitles indicating the various locations), the film constantly shifts to a poetic mode marked by an Impressionist predilection for water and smoke and for shifting fragments—reflections of light, parts of statues, legs of pedestrians, hectic traffic, playing children looking directly into the camera, a stray cat, an noticeably staged encounter between lovers, et cetera. Sauvage’s use of tilted angles, reverse motion, fast motion, and superimpositions rarely evokes the kineticism of the metropolis, as in the films by Ruttmann and Vertov, instead, his special effects turn Paris into a place of estrangement and a site of Surreal encounters. Many of Sauvage’s shots are reminiscent of the photographs of Eugène Atget, whom Sauvage considered a “grand metteur en scène.” Close to Robert Desnos, Jean Cocteau, and the Prévert brothers, Sauvage evokes a surreal landscape marked by signs and huge billboards and populated by clochards and mannequins in shop windows. Praised by Jacques-Bernard Brunius, Henri Chomette, and Jean-Georges Auriol as a “documentaire vraiment poétique,” the film celebrates the beauty of Notre Dame and the Eiffel Tower, but also that of the banlieues and the subterranean Canal St Martin.
Steven Jacobs
further reading
Breton, Emile, “Découvrir le Paris des années 1920,” l’Humanité (17 October 2012), English translation in Cinema Ritrovato (Bologna: Cineteca di Bologna, 2013), 150–1.
Le Roy, Eric (ed.), André Sauvage, poète insoumis: Textes sous la direction de Eric Le Roy (Paris: CNC, 2012) (DVD booklet).
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