Remembering Paris in text and film / edited by Alistair Rolls and Marguerite Johnson

This essay proposes to present and analyse the pictures or representations of Paris in Ernest Hemingway’s, Francis Scott Fitzgerald’s and Gertrude Stein’s different works. The theoretical framework of the piece is geocriticism by which the author attempts to discover how these works contributed to the literary construction of the French capital. The other objective of the essay is however to show the birth of a Parisian literary myth. After giving a brief overview of recent spatiality studies, the paper explains in-depth the geocritical method by the analysis of certain extracts of the different literary perceptions of Paris in the twenties, written by Francis Scott Fitzgerald (Babylon Revisited), Ernest Hemingway (A Moveable Feast) and Gertrude Stein (Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Paris, France). The latter approach can help to shed some light on the reasons why these expatriates (American and British writers, artists) came to Paris in the first place and what attracted them so much. Later on, the paper explains that the artists of the Lost Generation were disoriented and aimless after the war, so they headed to Paris to find some ‘old’ values and rebuild their lifes. These authors found there a new and very inspirational atmosphere, new friends, new goals, they started interesting publishing initiatives and searched for their proper literary voices. In the meantime, by representing the always exciting and crowded Parisian life, they created a literary myth of Paris which considers the city as safe haven for artists and writers – saying that Paris is a never resting “moveable feast”.

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This article examines the important yet overlooked 1965 omnibus film Paris vu par… (Paris Seen by…, a.k.a. Six in Paris), a transauthorial production bringing together the individual contributions of directors Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard, Eric Rohmer, Jean Rouch, Jean Douchet, and Jean Daniel Pollet. Like Paris, Je t’aime (2006) forty years after it (albeit on a very different scale), each episode of this film is set in a different section of the French capital, introduced by way of expository captions identifying the various locales and names of the filmmakers. Inspired by the writings of Walter Benjamin, Tom Conley, and Naomi Schor, the author examines how the six constituent parts of Paris vu par… crystallize various facets of French life scattered across the map of Paris, thus imparting a sense of representational wholeness despite the film’s metonymic slippage into modularity. In looking at the ways in which the topographical and sociopolitical ingredients of this film relate to aesthetic and narratological elements, the author seeks to draw out similarities between the idea of people as social clusters and the concept of narrative communities, attracting the reader’s eye to their spatial relations (as collections) while foregrounding the salient features of ‘postcard cinema’.

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Journal of Musicology, 2020

The ubiquitous din of Paris’s street hawkers, known as the cris de Paris or the “cries of Paris,” has captured the Parisian imagination since the Middle Ages. During the 1850s and 1860s, however, urban demolition severely disturbed the everyday rhythms of street commerce. The proliferation of books, poetry, and musical works featuring the cris de Paris circa 1860 reveals that many in the Parisian literary community feared the eventual disappearance of the city’s iconic sights and sounds. These nostalgia discourses transpired into broader criticism of Georges-Eugène Haussmann and the discriminatory mode of urbanism that he practiced. Haussmannization irrevocably altered the Parisian soundscape by displacing, policing, and thus silencing the working-class communities that made their living with their voices. As an ideological device, nostalgia offered a counternarrative to Second Empire ideas of progress by suggesting that urbanization would vanquish any remaining image of what came to be known as le vieux Paris. An analysis of Jean-Georges Kastner’s symphonic cantata Les cris de Paris (1857) shows how representations of the urban soundscape articulated a distinctly Parisian notion of modernity: a skirmish between a utopian “capital of the nineteenth century” and a romanticized Old City.

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Journal of Historical Geography, 2019

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Anamnesia: Private and Public Memory in Modern French Culture, 2009

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2010

September 1, 1999, saw the opening of Paris Las Vegas, the most ambitiously themed of Las Vegas’s resorts to that date. In 2001, Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge and Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Le Fabuleux destin d’Amelie Poulain were released to huge popular success. These two films share with the Vegas resort the mobilization of the brand or commodity “Paris,” and function via a shared alchemy of appeals to potential consumers (tourists and viewers in all cases). All feature prominent use of totemic Parisian imagery to situate their narratives, and invite us to travel to a “Paris” born of collective memory. This paper examines how Paris is commodified by the films and resort, as well as what these three examples can reveal about the image of Paris as an imaginary construct. It is necessary to examine the three phenomena as equal manifestations of a spike in an enduring fascination with particular concepts of Paris in the popular imagination and in the uses of commodity culture – a vogue heigh...

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The Urban Uncanny: A Collection of Interdisciplinary Studies, 2016

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The Journal of Modern History, 2003

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The subject of the city has long been central in studies and writings from different fields; architecture, urban and film studies, literature and photography. This is an exploratory paper, one that cuts across several disciplines with the intent of providing a wider knowledge on the cinematic of the city and its reproduction in filmic narratives. This paper explores not the complex relationship between film and place, but rather the ways in which the city has been represented through the ‘moving image’ both dramatised and envisioned, allowing us, as audience, to step into environments we have been before and/or will never directly experience. City space is both a filmic construction and an architectural construction. Filmic narratives of the city can also become an architectural practice: an art form of the city’s space. They are agents for building our views of the city, influencing the ways we live and perceive the city, and filmic representations will growingly be channelled into the city’s image. More than being a testament of the city’s history, could film be an instrument for testing and applying new perspectives to the city’s physical production? This paper suggests that filmic narratives are a major source for understanding the city and comprehending its processes of production. They can also be potential tools for recreating environments and ‘virtually’ explore the effects of the built environment on society and the urban whole. Both dramatised and envisioned cities are imagery constructs that allow reflecting about the conditions of urban life.

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In her article "Paris and the Birth of a Modern Fantastic during the Nineteenth Century" Patricia Garcia discusses the unprecedented growth of Europe's urban centers during the nineteenth century in relation to the realist novel and takes urban and literary Paris as a paradigm. However, nineteenth-century Paris was also to become the epicenter of another narrative form: the fantastic. Garcia's objective is to explore how the modern city fueled the development of the fantastic by combining the literary and urban angle: how do works of the fantastic write the city? What role does the modern city play in the emergence of the fantastic short story? Her argumentation is divided into two parts: the first explores how literature circulated in space while the second focuses on the representations of Paris in nineteenth-century fantastic fiction to demonstrate that with the acceleration of modernity, the fantastic became an urban form of expression.

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