In 1928, Georges Lacombe (1902–90), René Clair’s former assistant, made a film about the outskirts of Paris and its inhabitants. More precisely, he portrays the daily life of rag-pickers living in the periphery. Lacombe follows the dawn-to-dusk structure that became so typical for city symphonies. Early in the morning at 5:00 a.m., rag-pickers leave their homes with carts to collect anything useful and reusable thrown away in the city center and more wealthy districts of Paris in order to resell it. Back in the “Zone,” their work continues as they sort and recycle the collected goods: paper is stamped and bundled, scrap iron is pressed and sent to the factory for further metal processing, and recovered items are sold at the flea market at Porte de Clignancourt. The film also includes a scene involving a lunch break, which we find with frequency in the city symphony films. By 7:00 p.m., with dinner having taken place, the day in the Zone has already ended, and the rag-pickers retreat to their shelters so they can resume their daily activities at the break of dawn the next morning.
Lacombe’s debut as a director focuses on the poor and their miserable living conditions in the Zone, but there is a spirit to the film and to the lives depicted, as when we see children dancing to the music that a street performer makes with water-filled glasses. A number of characters or types are highlighted, such as this musician, a photographer, a gypsy, and the aged La Goulue, formerly the high-kicking, can-can-dancing star of the Moulin Rouge. La Zone is a socio-critical avant-garde documentary about the Parisian periphery, the shadowy existence of rag-pickers, and suburban poverty. However, it can also be read as a document dealing with the modern problem of garbage in the great cities and the environmentalist idea of waste separation and recycling. In the Zone, though, this developed purely out of the inhabitants’ necessity for survival.
Film historian and documentary filmmaker Lewis Jacobs recognized in Lacombe’s film the influence of Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler’s 1921 city symphony Manhatta, which made a great impression on European and French avant-garde documentary filmmakers of the 1920s, but it also displays strong resonances with some of the photographs of Eugène Atget, who shot extensively in the Zone.
Eva Hielscher
further reading
Canon, James, The Paris Zone: A Cultural History, 1840–1944 (London: Routledge, 2015).
Flinn, Margaret C., “Documenting Limits and the Limits of Documentary: Georges Lacombe’s ‘La Zone’ and the‘Documentaire Romancé’,” Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 13, 4 (September 2009): 405–13.
Jacobs, Lewis, “Precursors and Prototypes (1894–1922),” in Lewis Jacobs (ed.), The Documentary Tradition: From Nanook to Woodstock (New York, NY: Hopkinson and Blake, 1971), 2–9.
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