Wakeman Rosemary. The Heroic City: Paris, 1945-1958

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ﬁre) and technical advances such as kinescope, as well as a new television

studio at Buttes-Chaumont, helped to expand capabilities. The ﬁrst news

broadcast took place on June 29, 1949, and by 1950 the noontime Télé-Paris

program was being aired with local information and interviews with the city’s

glitterati. The launch of Eurovision in June 1954 and the Europe 1 network

in January 1955 gave RTF access to a new body of taped and live broadcasts

that considerably extended the television season.

Nonetheless, it was a slow

beginning, and the television audience was small. Parisians across a wide

political spectrum shared an initial mistrust of the new medium as culturally

corrupting and banal. And a television set remained far beyond most people’s

means. The Galeries Lafayette department store displayed models such as

the Grammont television set for a price of 10,000 francs, to say nothing of

the 4,000 francs required for television service.

In the early years, television was much more of a communal activity set

up in public places. Parisians watched television like a ﬁlm audience, in cafés

or standing outside store windows where sets were installed. Among the ﬁrst

live television broadcasts was a variety show from the Théâtre des Champs-

Élysées in June 1947. In 1948 viewers were treated to coverage of the Tour

de France arriving at the Parc des Princes and Christmas Eve services from

Notre Dame Cathedral. On New Year’s Eve 1951, crowds gathered in front of

the Rex Theater on the boulevard Poissonière to watch grainy black-and-white

images of Maurice Chevalier performing inside on television sets installed

on the sidewalk.

Like hundreds of thousands of other Europeans, in June

1953 Parisians stood mesmerized, watching the coronation of Elizabeth II

ﬂickering on television screens in cafés and shop windows or at a neighbor’s

house. It was many people’s ﬁrst major television experience. “It was THE

great day for television,” reported Paris Match.

The event provoked a rush

to rent or buy television sets and set up service.

As the standard of living improved over the course of the 1950s, con-

sumers opened their pocketbooks to acquire the magic box along with other

signs of leisure and recreation. By 1955 there were 142,000 television sets in

use in the Paris region, and by 1958 that number had more than doubled to

370,000.

Although the number of viewers remained small, the switch in the

early 1950s to live, on-location broadcasting made Paris a visual stage set for

television productions. Like ﬁlm, it produced, opened up, and mediatized

the city’s landscape, fracturing it into a multitude of local spaces and situa-

tions and into a montage of images. But television was even a more populist

paris as cinematic space | 207

medium than ﬁlm in the 1950s. Its descent into the streets relied far less on

professional actors and, in an early version of amateurish “reality” programs,

more on the city’s ordinary people. The unexceptional members of urban

society were made into celebrities. They were given agency in the spaces of

their lives. Television would thus be instrumental in the way the city’s land-

scape was produced, communicated, and visually grasped.

The Paris of Poetic Realism

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, much of French cinema followed the public’s

desire to forget the cruel realities, the penury and misery, of recent experi-

ence. Film after ﬁlm retreated into sumptuous costume dramas adapted from

literature and boulevard theater into screwball comedy, stereotypic yarns,

and heroic Resistance adventures—anywhere but the troubles of everyday

life. Neither economic scarcity nor the post Liberation purges nor the war

in Indochina appeared on the silver screen. While Italian cinema marched

bravely forward into neorealism, the French remained content with the rose-

colored distractions offered by ﬁlms such as French Cancan, by the cinematic

giant Jean Renoir. Comedian Fernandel with his toothy grin and thick Mar-

seilles accent enjoyed a major comeback, making multiple ﬁlms each year in

the 1950s. Heartthrob Gérard Philippe soared to fame in 1947 as a lovesick

adolescent in Le Diable du corps. He played the hero in countless romantic

dramas that appealed to the generation that came of age during the war.

Well-known prewar stars—Arletty, Sacha Guitry, Tino Rossi, Maurice Che-

valier, and Pierre Fresnay—were arrested for “soft” collaboration during the

Liberation. Most were released while their cases were being considered, and

they resumed their careers.

Despite the resentment their goodwill tours in

Germany aroused, Maurice Chevalier and Tino Rossi once again broke into

song in a cavalcade of ﬁlmed musical comedies. The time-honored image of

Paris as spectacle ﬁlled the need for these frothy and entertaining diversions

quite nicely. Particularly enticing were cinematic peeks into the beau monde

of the Champs-Élysées or the rue Royale, whose lifestyle few Parisians could

enjoy at the war’s end. Filmgoers were titillated by campy descents into the

delights of Minuit Champs-Élysées, Scandale aux Champs-Élysées, La Dame de

chez Maxim’s, and Le Chasseur de chez Maxim’s.

The early 1950s were the years of studio productions in the French ﬁlm

industry. This was in part a response to the scarcity of resources. Electricity,

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coal for heat, and celluloid ﬁlm were all precious commodities, and they

could all be economized on upon sound stages. But studio ﬁlms were also

a mechanism for quality control; that is to say, rather than relying on the

exigencies of on-location sets, ﬁlmmakers fabricated highly stylized and

perfected productions in the tradition of prestigious, high-gloss French

cinema.

Protected by the strict regulations and censorship of the Centre

national du cinéma (CNC) and conventional training at the Institut des

hautes études cinématographiques (IDHEC), the ﬁlm industry became

a closed-circuit corporate system dominated by the privileged elites who

reemerged after the war: Marcel Carné, Jacques Prévert, René Clair, René

Clément, and Julien Duvivier. It was this prewar avant-garde of the golden

age of French ﬁlmmaking, transmuted by the war into an entrenched co-

terie, that provided the continuity of poetic vision. This poetic realism was

endlessly reproduced through the studio and star system, by sophisticated

decor and lighting, complicated camera angles, brilliant dialogue, and the

use of literary adaptation. Its appeal derived from a unique combination

of feeling, sentimentality, and social criticism. Relying on this formula,

French ﬁlm production has often been criticized as being overly intellec-

tual, almost mechanical. It was only the young turks of the nouvelle vague

in the late 1950s that ﬁnally transformed French ﬁlmmaking and with it

the vision of Paris.

This is in part what makes the cinematic presentation of Paris so useful

to this analysis. It was invented by ﬁlmmakers and presented to the public

as urban artiﬁce. Working in the studio was a response to the theatrical tra-

dition of French cinema and insured complete creative control to fabricate

Paris and the thousand cinematic stories of its streets. A visual urban the-

ater was fashioned through emphasis on formal visual beauty, on music and

decor, atmosphere, and on an ensemble of actors rather than close-ups of

isolated stars.

However, ﬁlm directors also used a combination of studio

sets and location shoots that together merged into a distinct urban imagi-

nary that coincided with poetic realist, or humanist, sensibilities. “When

will the cinema go down into the street?” Marcel Carné famously asked.

The city ceased to be simply background. Instead, urban life itself became

the focus of cinematic study. The ﬁlms were encoded with cues that stood

for “social reality.” In the hands of poetic realist directors, Paris became the

stage on which the lives and labors of ordinary people were played out in an

atmosphere of everyday humanity. There was a close resemblance between

paris as cinematic space | 209

the view of the photographer-ﬁlmmaker and that of the wanderer, and a

correlation of urban life with the street.

Directors such as Marcel Carné and Valéry Jahier had long called for a

socially committed cinema. These roots lay in the 1930s and the experience of

the Popular Front. Indeed, the term “poetic realism” was ﬁrst used cinemati-

cally to describe Pierre Chenal’s La Rue sans nom (1933), an allusion once

again to the magical, populist qualities associated with the street. The avant-

garde Groupe Octobre (1932–36) included individuals directly involved in

ﬁlmmaking: Jean-Paul Dreyfus-Le Chanois, Joseph Kosma, Jacques Prévert,

Jean Renoir, and Alexander Trauner. Ciné-Liberté (1936–37), which was di-

rectly linked to the CGT and the Popular Front, absorbed members of the

defunct Groupe Octobre and produced a number of ouvriériste documentary

and educational ﬁlms. This social urban imaginary was made even more vital

by the Resistance and the Liberation and the triumph of the working classes

at the war’s end. Historians have often condemned the French ﬁlm indus-

try for its lack of vision and its reversion to prewar cinematographers and

stylistic forms. But poetic realism remained successful because it reﬂected

a heroic vision of Paris and its populist spaces in the late 1940s and early

1950s. The degree to which it mirrored its times is striking. The quotidian

world of working-class neighborhoods formed a renewed circle of nobility

and legitimacy. Even those insightful ﬁlms that attempted a more “socially

realistic” portrayal of the city at midcentury, and which were often quite

political, remained within this genre of populist or poetic realism. That is to

say, they offered a stylized vision of the city that reinvented familiar places

and characters and made them wholesome and valiant—in a word, heroic.

The theater was the metaphor for visualizing cinematic urban space and

collective practices in these ﬁlms, whether in the neighborhood, the street, or

an individual building. More than just architecture and built environment,

Paris is lived space. It is an urban scenography, a social spectacle, in which

performances by formulaic individuals symbolized the “people” and their

essential humanity. In other words, poetic realism created a social fantasy

in the city’s public domain and the pursuits and encounters that took place

there. The pervasive use of aerial or long views that captured the iconographic

visions of Paris, the crowd sequences ﬁlmed from eye or ground level, and

the animated street scenes underscore the signiﬁcance of urban spatiality in

this ﬁlm genre. We are placed at the intersection of various personal journeys

through Paris, each of them emblematic of city life. The heroes go in search

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of their souls, ﬁnd joy or tragedy, and live out their daily heartbreaks and

pleasures. They are enclosed in an atmosphere that is poignant and meta-

physical. The city’s spaces are a transcendental fabric that holds more than

mere appearances. They could easily be described as psychogeographical

in the situationist sense of searching for valid experience and the self in the

milieu of the street. Fate, hubris, pathos, bravery, tragedy, and joy are all at

work in the landscape. It is not the external spectacle that matters as much

as the search for truth. The city surfaces are emotional, psychological, ﬁlled

with pervasive moods and moral parables. There is optimism, yet paradox

and uncertainty. In this respect both ﬁlm and still photography brilliantly

captured the mood of the city as it recovered from war and faced a modern

transformation in the second half of the century.

We can look at some of the masterpieces that “produced” Paris in the

late 1940s and 1950s as a means of understanding this visual invention of the

city’s landscape. As a genre they are poetic humanist documentaries, journeys

of ethnographic discovery that uncovered the courage and innate decency of

the peuple in their urban milieu. Jacques Becker’s Antoine et Antoinette (1947)

is one of the best examples of this quotidian poetic naturalism that situated

Paris socially and topographically in the reconstruction years.

The ﬁlm was

an enormous popular success and won the award for Best Psychological and

Romantic Film at the 1947 Cannes Film Festival. It offered a living tableau

of the petit peuple and their neighborhood in the 18th arrondissement. Becker

saw himself as a cinéaste social and had already worked as an assistant direc-

tor, along with Le Chanois, on the Communist Party’s propaganda ﬁlm La

Vie est à nous (1936), with its stories of everyday life. His sympathies with

the party were of long standing, as was evidenced in his ﬁlming of combat

scenes in La Libération de Paris (1944). The Antoine and Antoinette of his

ﬁlm are a young working-class couple conﬁdent about their lives despite the

lack of decent housing and the scarcity of just about everything else. They

are the epitome of reconstruction optimism, a modern version of the sublimes

ouvriers that reﬂects the insistent tug of the past as well as the seductive lure

of the future.

Antoine (Roger Pigaut) is a skilled paper cutter in a book-publishing fac-

tory. Antoinette (Claire Maffei) works at the Prisunic on the Champs-Élysées.

They inhabit a working-class world of hopefulness and human decency. The

ﬁlm portrays their efforts at self-improvement and their clever grasp of the

newfangled technologies of the postwar world. In an almost documentary

paris as cinematic space | 211

style, Becker takes us through a series of quotidian urban scenes ﬁlled with

humor and bonhomie: the working-class couple at work, in the Métro, at

home, at dinner where they share what food they have, at the bistro with

friends, at the soccer match, at the park. Their freedom of movement across

the city, the multiplicity of spaces they traverse, mark postwar conceptions

of modern urban experience as ﬂuid and self-assured. The dialog is simple

and sincere, the characters virtuous. The ﬁlm is an affectionate fantasy of

neighborhood solidarity and sociability. Antoine and Antoinette’s family is

their quartier. Their private lives spill out into the public domain. Chance

conversations and face-to-face encounters, friendship and daily support are

everywhere. There is no anonymity or alienation to plague urban existence.

A kind local grocer slips Antoinette a free can of sardines to take with her

vegetables. Her neighbor steps in to protect her against the advances of the

lecherous petit-bourgeois bof who mistreats his women employees. Their love

and bravery in the face of postwar troubles land the couple a winning lottery

ticket. The plot revolves around the precious ticket that is found, lost, and

then found again in a happy ending ﬁlled with the promise of material well-

being. In the ﬁlm’s last scene Antoine jubilantly rides off on the motorcycle

figure 23. Roger Pigaut and Claire Maffei as the title characters in Jacques Becker’s ﬁlm

Antoine et Antoinette. Production Gaumont, 1947. © gaumont.

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he has long coveted, with Antoinette in the sidecar beside him. Despite the

rain clouds, despite the housing crisis and hardship, all turns out well.

Becker’s ﬁlm is a mild sociological study of Parisian working-class mores,

behavior, and aspirations that conformed to all the rules of populist poetic

realism. His style was known for its precision, its dedication to authentic,

documentary-style conception in almost artisanal terms. His depiction of Pa-

risian life reiterated the ouvriériste viewpoint of French social scientists in their

quest to “take the pulse” of postwar realities. The movie is an ethnographic

research project. It illuminates a working-class urban experience that had

largely been out of sight, ignored, and treated with contempt. And it found

that the traditional neighborhoods and quotidian public spaces of Paris were

the arena of the city’s magniﬁcence. It was here that the innate nobility and

humanity of the French could be found, and where the resurgence of urban-

ity and civic life was most evident. The ﬁlm produces the working classes in

their own surroundings with an exact attention to behavior and interpersonal

relations, to the rituals of sociability and the uses of urban space. This was not

simply a reiteration of cinematic codes of the prewar years. It was a universe

of understanding, a postwar populist conviction that captured ﬁlmmakers

and photographers as well as sociologists and ethnographers, and of course

the public at large. Film particularly leant itself to this poetic narrative about

the nobility and heroism of the quotidian. Antoine and Antoinette’s desire

for a good life embraces material abundance, decent living conditions, good

relations with their neighbors in peace and security. The ﬁlm endows these

desires with a symbolic meaning that makes them something more. The young

French couple was making history in the modest arena of their quartier. Their

individual lives were the story of family, class, and nation.

It is interesting to note that the ﬁlm appeared in late 1947, a year of ram-

pant inﬂation and a precipitous drop in the standard of living. While ﬁlmgo-

ers enjoyed the fragile illusion of Antoine et Antoinette in their neighborhood

theaters, strike waves and pitched street battles reverberated through the city.

A ﬁlm review by Roger Boussinot in Action remarked that Antoine and Antoi-

nette “were not unionized, made no demands . . . they are the conventional

bourgeois dream of good workers . . . the likable domestic pets of a society

that presses on them all the weight of injustice.” What proof did Boussinot

offer for the illegitimacy of Becker’s notion of “realism”? In the ﬁght scene,

when Antoine ﬁnally clobbers the lascivious grocer, the couple’s tiny apart-

ment is demolished. The neighbors gather to cheer Antoine on, but no one

paris as cinematic space | 213

rushes to save their belongings. “This is idiotic!” groused Boussinot. “Any

worker knows only too well the value, the cost in work, of each object not to

show any upset when some creep destroys all his neighbor’s possessions.”

All of these early postwar ﬁlms were rigorously reviewed by a budding series

of specialized ﬁlm periodicals. Cosponsored by the PCF and two Resistance

movements and hosted by Les Lettres françaises, the ﬁlm review L’Écran français

was perhaps the best in terms of quality, style, and openness. But all of them,

including Action, kept a keen eye on the visual invention of the victorious

working classes. Regardless of the criticisms, the Communist Party took ad-

vantage of the ﬁlm’s success by staging a promotional campaign comparing

the lives of two hundred young working-class couples in its weekly magazine

Regards and naming the CGT women’s group Antoinette. And Becker replied

to Boussinot’s caustic critique that his intention was to give ﬁlmgoers

an exact as possible impression of the ATTITUDE of the men and

women of the Parisian working class. . . . Neither the cinema nor the

theater has ever paid homage to certain precious qualities that are often

encountered among workers . . . kindness, emotional restraint, hospital-

ity, they are capable of loving with true passion, incapable of the “fake

pretensions” of the bourgeoisie. They possess an instinctive “breeding”

(“education”) . . . workers are more profoundly “gracious” than the

bourgeoisie in their social relations. . . . This kindheartedness that French

workers share between them, the sincerity of their love, this graciousness

that they almost constantly exhibit, their “optimism,” this “wholesome”

optimism that has its origins in “wholesome” hearts, this is what I wanted

to show in my ﬁlm.

Becker lays out a social landscape from the vantage point of a poetic human-

ist. The quotidian spaces of the city become the stage in which human—that

is, psychological and moral stories—are played out. More than just back-

drop, Paris becomes an extension of individual self-awareness. Examining

the everyday lives, the lived experience, of average people in the various

microcosms of Paris was a device for probing French society at a moment

of extraordinary change. It portrayed the insider’s knowledge that was key

to understanding the symbolic and subjective meanings people utilize to

comprehend their world.

Julien Duvivier’s ﬁlm Sous le ciel de Paris (1951) is perhaps the epitome

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of this poetic humanism.

In this particular ﬁlm, Paris was clearly the star,

and the plot explored the experiences and moods of the city. The ﬁlm opens

with a panoramic aerial sequence (shot by the cinematographer René Cor-

beau) along the Seine, with its iconic architecture and monuments. This is

unmistakably Paris, and the perspective promises to capture the city’s totality

of experience. One ﬁlm critic commented that it was like watching the city’s

life from atop the Eiffel Tower. From this altitude, Paris is comprehended

as a living cartography to be explored. However, the ﬁlm scholar Edward

Dimendberg has made the point that this type of grandiloquent aerial open-

ing raises suspicions and might be better grasped as anxiety that the “city

had been eclipsed and its concentrated centers rendered inconsequential.”

The palpable absence of a single prominent center, despite the recognizable

landmarks, and the continual motion of the camera “hint at a decisive shift”

in identity.

Although Dimendberg is referring to ﬁlm noir’s portrayal of

American cities, the same sensation is evident in Duvivier’s ﬁlm. Filmmak-

ers visually echoed the city’s fragmentation and the consequent trepidation

that the monumental identity of Paris had vanished.

Swooping down on the city and gradually dropping, the camera fractures

the landscape by following the exploits of a group of six individuals across

the capital—this time over the course of a single day, during which they each

discover “their destiny.” The ﬁlm has a sociological, investigatory quality. The

roles were played by unknown young actors, which added to the sense of

realistic documentation. This social tableau of everyday heroes ranged from

the poor to the wealthy, the young to the old. Duvivier’s camera is a voy-

euristic peek into their lives. The camera lens adopts the gaze of the ﬂâneur

as a means of knowing. However, in this case the ﬂâneur is invisible, outside

the space he peers into and observes through his device. Duvivier’s position

provides him an extraordinary ability to take “visual possession of the city”

and invent its phenomena.

The visual narrative is deeply humanistic in its

vivid recognition of the “faceless” in the urban crowd. It was this “human

quality” that critic Boussinot pointed to as representing classic French ﬁlm-

making.

An old women living in misery begs for food for her cats. A worker

named Hermenault takes part in a strike at his factory. Georges Forrestier, a

medical student, is trying to pass his exams. His girlfriend, Marie-Thérèse,

lives the high life as a fashion model. A newcomer, Denise Lombers, arrives

from the provinces in search of “love, fortune, and glory.” For all of them,

Paris is ﬁlled with both opportunities and delusions. The ﬁlm is a story of

paris as cinematic space | 215

their journeys—a sociopsychological mapping. The plot stitches together a

spatial narrative from their individual bits and pieces that is embedded in

the city’s landscape. It is a voyage of personal discovery and destiny—from

Notre Dame to the Eiffel Tower, from the Bastille to the Opéra, the bridges

on the Seine and the quays of Bercy and Auteuil, the streets of Ménilmontant

and Montmartre. The viewer follows along to explore the landscape of Paris

produced in this cinematic montage.

Duvivier presents a mobile, vigorous place streaming with human and

vehicular trafﬁc. Horse-drawn wagons and bicycles weave between taxis

and automobiles hurtling through the streets. Trafﬁc jams, with their inevi-

table accidents and blaring horns, border the Seine. Crowds pack the rue

Mouffetard on market day. Students jam the Latin Quarter while shoppers

stream in and out of department stores. Boats and barges travel the river.

The photo shoot at the Trocadéro fountains, with fashion models draped in

elegant dresses and dripping with jewels, is the epitome of prosperity, while

the unwanted elderly rummage through garbage and eat at soup kitchens. A

ﬁsherman discovers a body ﬂoating in the Seine—“the third this year,” the

police inspector remarks, presumably killed by the ﬁlm’s mad sculptor, who

slits the throat of an innocent woman along a gloomy street. The ﬂeeting

scenes reinforce the geography of the ﬁlm as fragmented spatial pieces.

Sous le ciel de Paris attempts to map the moods and drama of the city by

traversing it. The shifting of scenes from one place to another is enormously

effective in conveying emotion and psychological drama. The individualized

psychogeographies are experiments in understanding divergent experiences.

This ﬁlm and others like it explored the speed and intensity of the modern city,

the perpetual movement and circulation of people, goods, encounters, and

events. They captured the bizarre juxtapositions and strange coincidences, the

simultaneity of experience. The boundaries between interior space and public

space remain permeable. We see and hear the tensions and antagonisms, the

sheer quantity, the brilliance as well as the indifference, the hopefulness and

fears—in other words, the kaleidoscopic ﬂow of contemporary life through

the capital. It is where destiny plays its hand. Particularly evocative are the

expeditions or pilgrimages, many overtaken by unexpected events inevitable

in the city’s life. They are journeys of discovery. The viewer is asked to de-

scend from the heights of aerial panorama and penetrate the city’s streets

and buildings, to see beyond the surfaces to the feeling and humanity of the

city’s thousand ordinary stories. Little Colette (Marie-France) runs away