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

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216 | chapter five

from home to avoid being punished for getting bad grades in school. She

embarks on a trip down the Seine and under the pont Neuf to Australia (the

Île Saint-Louis) and New Zealand (the quays of Bercy) with a young boy

who captains their small vessel. Suddenly abandoned on the quay, lost and

afraid, she wanders through the alleys of Bercy as night approaches, only to

meet the mad sculptor Mathias, who has murder in his eyes. Because she

befriends him in innocence, Mathias spares her life and accompanies her back

across the Seine to her home on the rue Mouffetard. There the miserable old

woman who has been rejected by everyone fulﬁlls her destiny by helping the

frightened child ﬁnd the courage to confront her parents. Colette’s journey

through Paris and her chance meeting with the strangers who haunt the streets

have given her the maturity to face her fears and her responsibilities.

We take a similar pilgrimage across Paris in Le Chanois’s Sans laisser

d’adresse,

released in January 1951, which won the Golden Bear Prize at

the Berlin Film Festival the same year and was also warmly welcomed in

the Soviet Union. Le Chanois (whose real name was Jean-Paul Dreyfus; Le

Chanois was his wartime pseudonym) was from a Jewish family in the 9th

arrondissement of Paris. He was an early member of Prévert’s band of young

followers who met together in Prévert’s apartment on the rue Dauphine, and

an enthusiastic member of the Groupe Octobre hanging out in the cafés of

Saint-Germain-des-Prés during the 1930s. It was through Prévert’s inﬂuence

that Le Chanois was introduced to the capital’s populist universe. He wrote

productions for the Fête de l’Humanité, attended the May commemora-

tions of the Paris Commune at Père Lachaise Cemetery, and took part in

the Groupe Octobre’s agitprop theater. By 1933 Le Chanois had became a

member of the Communist Party. He was part of the Resistance during the

war, then later organized a French cinematic underground cell attached to

the CGT and worked clandestinely both in the provinces and in Paris.

Like Prévert, Le Chanois was an author, a poet, and a songwriter as well as

a cinematographer. His ﬁlms exuded the populism of the poetic realist style.

They are portraits of the contradictions, optimism, and doubts about the

postwar world. Le Chanois’s “tender, sensitive, charmingly funny” portrayal

of everyday petit bourgeois family life “without pretension” in the 18th ar-

rondissement in Papa, maman, la bonne et moi (1954) is perhaps the better-

known of his two populist ﬁlms.

Here we have a good-humored caricature

of the average French family, Paris profond, that takes the pulse of life in the

fragmented cartography of the city’s neighborhoods.

paris as cinematic space | 217

In Sans laisser d’adresse, the actress Danièle Delorme plays a young mother

arriving in Paris at the gare de Lyon to ﬁnd the father of her child, who has

left her in Chambéry “without leaving an address.” Thérèse has no money

or support, but she meets a benevolent taxi driver, Émile Gauthier (Bernard

Blier), who takes it upon himself to solve her predicament by piloting her

around Paris in his no. 85 Renault G7 in search of Forrestier, her absent

lover. The hunt, set to the music of Joseph Kosma, forms the pretext for an

extraordinary tour of the city and its neighborhoods. The character of Émile

functions as an up-to-date ﬂâneur, a proxy and guide for the ﬁlm’s viewers. In

his 1946 tourist guide of Paris, Léon Paul Fargue argued that the best kind

of contemporary ﬂânerie in Paris was by taxi.

And indeed Émile’s taxi spins

around the place de la Bastille, where an open-air orchestra leads a local fête.

From the rue Ravignan in the 18th arrondissement to the rue de l’Abbaye in

the 6th, Émile and Thérèse drive from destination to destination in search

of Forrestier, at one point following a tour bus loaded with visitors craning

their necks left and right to see the “beauties of Paris.” They stop at a bistro

at Barbès and at the Club Saint-Germain, where Juliette Greco sings. Émile

attends a union meeting at the Mutualité on the rue Saint-Victor in the 5th

arrondissement. In a symbolic gesture of working-class solidarity, he dons

a jacket and tie and steps up to the tribune to become union treasurer. The

ﬁlm was quotidian theater, threaded with the common language and humor

of populist sociability, with the slang of the street. The characters exude a

natural simplicity and goodness.

Paris appears as a collection of quartiers that are emblematic visual codes

for populist space. Film was a medium for discovering the city’s fragmented

spatial imaginary and portraying the human drama in a public domain ﬁlled

with instantaneous moments and quotidian possibilities. Le Chanois’s ﬁlm

constructs a landscape of familiarity and spontaneous social and verbal ex-

change. The streets are a place of face-to-face contact. Émile’s assorted clients,

the neighborhood denizens who guide their search for the wayward father

Forrestier, the street sweepers, the hospital nurses, the railway workers all

come alive in a scenography of everyday urban existence. In certain ways, it

was the visual analog to the melodrama and spatial discovery of Louis Ma-

let’s detective Nestor Burma stalking the streets in search not of cads, but of

criminals. The scenes are atmospheric and psychogeographic.

On the rue de la Saïda in the 18th arrondissement, the duo come upon

a sordid square and a forlorn HBM public housing project. Émile describes

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the people from all walks of life who have found shelter in this caserne (bar-

racks). Among them is Forrestier, and it is his wife and child who answer

Thérèse and Émile’s knock at the door. Hopeless and disheartened, Thérèse

ﬂees. She contemplates abandoning her baby on a quay overlooking the Seine.

Émile and his comrades launch their ﬂeet of taxis through Paris in search of

her—to the boulevard Diderot, to the place de la Nation, the rue Chalon, to

Bercy—in what Jacques Krier called in his review of the ﬁlm “a new ‘Battle of

the Marne,’ so moving, in order to save a poor girl who no longer believes in

happiness.”

Émile’s comrades share an elemental fraternity and optimism.

Thérèse is rescued by the simple goodness and humanity of the peuple de

Paris. For both characters, their chance encounters through Paris have been

a voyage of personal discovery. The taxi driver navigates the urban landscape

as an extension of himself. The ﬁlm ends with a smiling Émile bathed in

an angelic light that echoes Ronis’s working-class photographic portraits.

Like Ronis, Le Chanois produced a tableau of the common people—their

heroism, innate compassion, and bonhomie. Patrons sitting in local movie

houses across the working-class districts watched stylized, valiant versions

of themselves. It was an easy visual palliative for the struggle taking place in

the streets.

Television Hits the Streets: Paris En Direct de . . .

Television opened up the public spaces of the city for viewing as no other

medium had ever done. It created a new visual collage of images that rep-

resented reality and was absorbed collectively as contemporary values. Its

aesthetic was increasingly based on live and on-location broadcasting that

created the illusion of instantaneousness, of simultaneity, of dramatizing the

ephemera of the city’s everyday life. Entirely under the control of the French

state, live television coverage was certainly not extended to the strikes and

demonstrations, the pitched battles with police, the round-ups of suspect

Algerians that rocked the streets in the 1950s. Homelessness and poverty

made no appearance on television screens. Instead, the new medium broad-

cast a prosaic spatial imaginary. With their parades, live music, and street

dances, July 14 celebrations were in particular a source for live news coverage.

The annual Kermesse aux Étoiles was televised annually from the Tuileries

gardens beginning in 1949. Television captured the sporting events and the

movie stars and celebrities who sought the camera’s glare and mingled with

paris as cinematic space | 219

fans. However, television shows and reporting did not simply record events,

but dramatized and indeed produced them. For example, the commotion

over a holdup on the rue Vaneau in March 1945 was shown on television

just two hours after the incident, spectacularizing what would ordinarily be

considered a commonplace crime. The discovery of old gold coins during the

demolition of a building on the rue Mouffetard was broadcast in real time,

cameras panning the normally mundane street packed with shoppers and

gawkers. In 1956 RTF staged a mock air attack on Paris under the pretext of

testing the city’s air defenses. The effect of all this was to create the impression

of simultaneity, of immediacy, of a scenography of the ephemeral in public

space and the illusion of participation and voyeurism.

The development of French television and especially this type of live on-

location reporting was most clearly associated with the arrival in 1952 of Jean

D’Arcy as director of broadcasting at RTF. D’Arcy was anxious for television

to create its own aesthetic and style and saw it ultimately as a populist me-

dium. He recalled in his autobiography that “we were delighted with photos

of bidonvilles or the northern districts topped with television antennas. This

was the sense that we had of our mission. Not at all of misery or pauperism,

but the desire to bring to people the opportunity to dream, to escape, which

they had much more need of than the public today.”

He quickly changed

the orientation of the early line-ups from ﬁlm reruns and prerecorded the-

atrical shows to live programming and on-location transmissions. Television

became an open window on French life as D’Arcy’s seven teams of reporters

with their cameramen and equipment in tow descended into the streets, into

factories and mines, into parks and museums, anywhere there was something

to see. For the 1952 Semaine franco-britannique citywide event, four equipment

teams loaded down with eleven cameras tethered by cable to production

trucks descended into the streets to capture “a true image of contemporary

life in Paris and of the Parisians,” which were mixed and transmitted live via

the Eiffel Tower and a local transmitter in Lille to television screens across

the United Kingdom.

Images of the public spaces and sites of the city were

scrutinized by the camera’s gaze and spread out all over the country. This

produced a disjointed and chaotic montage of places and situations. Paris

was made visible and mediatized, made instantly accessible to discovery and

exploration.

From the mid-1950s television shows such as the Sunday evening En

direct de . . . transported viewers to sites throughout Paris from an insider’s

220 | chapter five

tour of the Panthéon, to the International Boat Show on the Seine, to the

inauguration of the UNESCO headquarters on the place Fontenoy. Some

sense of the growing quantity of these on-location shows and their broadening

coverage can be gleaned from descriptions in weekly television magazines. A

tour of the “horse sculptures” of Paris took viewers to the city’s monumen-

tal parks and especially to the Luxembourg gardens, where neighborhood

denizens of the Boul’ Mich’ were interviewed during the show. The popular

program Ce soir à Paris went on location to various sites from the fabulous

Moulin Rouge to the shadowy Rôtisserie de l’Abbaye basement club of Saint-

Germain-des-Prés, while Les Actualités françaises went to hear rock ’n’ roll at

the Club Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The series Visite à . . . took viewers on a

musical tour of the Île-Saint-Louis and to the gardens of the Palais Royale.

Les Actualités françaises spent “Twelve Hours at Les Halles” in 1952. Some

of these locations were normally off-limits to the general public. In February

1959, for example, En direct de . . . went to the Hôtel de Ville and entered the

historic reception rooms, covered with Aubusson and Gobelin tapestries,

where viewers “would be received like Queen Elizabeth of England.”

Live

broadcasting invented a censored, televised style of touristic spatiality. More-

over, it produced a highly stylized, almost ceremonial portrait of modernity

and the prosperity associated with postwar reconstruction and the trente

glorieuses.

Television created new discursive spaces and new dimensions of the pub-

lic sphere in which ordinary people became media celebrities. French radio

programming had already led the way with on-location programs such as

the overwhelmingly popular On chante dans mon quartier (also known by its

theme song, “Ploum-ploum”), which began broadcasting in December 1945.

Hosted by the celebrated singer Saint-Granier, each day at 12:30

. the

program visited a city or neighborhood in Paris and invited amateur singers

to compete in a song contest, with the local crowd acting as the background

choir. On chante dans mon quartier was a product of the Liberation and the

reappropriation of public space that was so critical to the city’s renewed sense

of freedom. It was followed by a number of other radio music-contest and

game shows that went on expeditions through the streets of the city. Televi-

sion built on this form of populist participatory spatiality. Even more, unlike

relatively passive ﬁlm viewing, on-location television programs created recip-

rocal practices. There was always a possibility of “audiences” being seen and

performing. In January 1951 the newspaper Paris-presse sponsored a televised

paris as cinematic space | 221

treasure hunt called “La Course aux Étoiles” from “under the four iron feet of

the Eiffel Tower.” Devoted readers found clues in the newspaper that would

reveal the location of various “star emblems” hidden on the grounds of the

Champs de Mars. The winner would not only ﬁnd himself or herself fêted

on television, but would also receive the grand prize of a Philips television

set worth 72,000 francs.

This multilayered, mediatized space (a televised

contest with the winner receiving a television, on television) was reiterated

in game shows broadcast live. France’s ﬁrst popular television game show,

Télé-match, began broadcasting on Thursday evenings in 1954. Created under

the guidance of Jean D’Arcy, the series went out into the public spaces of

Paris, en direct de . . . , to give the city’s ordinary people, the man or woman

in the street, a chance to win money and prizes. Its host, Pierre Bellemare,

described the show’s extraordinary success: “The streets were black with

people when we went out. The popular enthusiasm was amazing.”

Like an

early version of reality television, some contestants on Télé-match became

momentary celebrities in their own right and were brought back on the pro-

gram by popular demand. Although the contestant Georges Lacœur lost the

game on the history of Paris to Brigette Bar, he resurfaced on Télé-match as

a tour guide through his neighborhood in the Marais. Lacœur discussed his

amateur ﬂânerie to explore the ancient alleyways, the old hotels, and the rustic

buildings, and with the show’s camera team in tow he pointed out to viewers

the “oldest house in Paris.” What is played up in this form of celebrity is the

connection to ordinary lives and ordinary spaces. The normally powerless

could be heard and seen. In 1958 Télé-match was at the Buttes-Chaumont for

a pétanque contest. Although Jo Arama, a former pétanque national champion

who worked as a bof in Les Halles, lost the contest, he returned on the show

to give viewers tips on their pétanque game.

For the July 14 festivities in 1959, Bellemare was on the place d’Italie with

microphone in hand, followed by his team of cameramen. Passersby were

randomly chosen to answer game questions presented live in the television

studio for a prize of 20,000 francs. By August the show had developed a

“treasure hunt,” with co-host Jacques Bénétin and his television team wan-

dering through Paris to ask unsuspecting ordinary people to identity mys-

terious objects.

Televising and making celebrities of “real people” in Paris

was the ultimate expression of populist sensibilities. Putting ordinary people

on display was a successful form of entertainment because they were viewed

through the lens of decency and admiration. The image of the threatening

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proletariat, of the teeming and uncultivated hordes, was discarded for that

of a people naturalized and at home in the spaces of the city. The television

camera acted as voyeur, saturating the screen with Parisians’ reasonableness,

intelligence, and generosity of spirit. The ﬁlm characters Antoine, Antoinette,

and Émile Gauthier could easily appear in the crowd. The lens focused on

and opened up the spaces of their lives to reveal the moods and drama of

their everyday world. Their dramatic performances depicted the thousand

ordinary stories of the street and gave the peuple the veneer of a spontaneous,

immediate agency.

From 1957 to 1960 Jean-Claude Bergeret and Jacques Krier produced a

series of fourteen short documentary ﬁlms for television called A la découverte

des français. Their purpose was to explore the new medium of television as a

form of popular education. The ﬁlms were meant to showcase the research

of Paul-Henry Chombart de Lauwe and his team at the Groupe d’ethnologie

sociale at the Musée de l’Homme. Chombart acted as the consultant for the

series, the objective of which was to show the structures of social life written

in the landscape in both the provinces and the capital. Chombart knew Jean

D’Arcy well and like him was anxious to experiment with the new television

medium as an instructive tool. As a whole, the series composed a panoramic

view of everyday life in the urban neighborhoods and provincial villages of

France during the 1950s. Much like Jacques Becker’s commercial ﬁlms, they

were a visual device—a voyage of discovery—for understanding national life

during the trente glorieuses. Although the Communist Party is often associated

with opposition to television as an American corruption, in a 1994 interview

Jacques Krier explained:

We were men of the Left. I was a communist. The others weren’t, but they

were still very left-wing. This was the generation of the Liberation. We

were very politicized, and politicized on the left. We had many common

opinions, especially a very strong ethic concerning television, an ethic of

public service. This was an absolute value that we shared.

The social groups presented were archetypal and easily identiﬁable: work-

ers, salaried employees, miners, peasants. There is a sense of ethnographic

curiosity about these shows. Jacques Krier humorously admitted, “We went

to ﬁnd the French like ﬁlmmakers in search of the natives.”

It was, in other

words, a form of sociological ﬁeldwork. The effect was a voyeuristic look into

paris as cinematic space | 223

a micro–social world in which the theater of the everyday was put in motion.

Each ﬁlm presented a speciﬁc collectivity along with the families and indi-

viduals that inhabited it. Their everyday practices, social relations, and forms

of public engagement were made visible. For Paris, the areas chosen were

the slum district of Moulin de la Pointe in the 13th arrondissement and the

rue Mouffetard in the 5th arrondissement. Two other ﬁlms in the series dealt

with the Paris suburbs: the Café du Beau Site and La Butte à la Reine.

In the ﬁrst ﬁlm in the series, a taxi brings us to the rue du Moulin de la

Pointe, a small street in the 13th arrondissement slum of Maison Blanche.

There we meet the Spinoza family and their newborn infant, Serge.

watch as the neighborhood women knit baby clothes for the new mem-

ber of the neighborhood while children play in the “authentic” traditional

courtyard. In the Chombartian understanding of urban space, the court-

yard is a social unit, its own miniature îlot with its own life. It was precisely

in these diminutive, hidden public spaces and the family homes that sur-

rounded them that pensée populaire was elaborated. Neighborhood func-

tions in tangible places that change with the rhythms and temporality of

daily existence. The women do their washing, sweeping, and cleaning in

the courtyard; Monsieur Spinoza works on his scooter there with Serge as

he grows up. Having aggravated the neighbors, the children ﬁnd refuge in

the home of the local ﬁreman to watch children’s shows on the new televi-

sion set. Families attend the neighborhood cinema and promenade along

the avenue d’Italie on Sunday afternoons. We see men playing pool and

sharing drinks at the zinc in a friendly neighborhood bistro. The men work

in the local automobile factories, while the women ﬁnd jobs in the leather

industry of the Bièvre.

Poverty, high infant mortality, and a tumbledown housing stock with

cramped rooms that lacked running water, gas, and electricity deﬁned Moulin

de la Pointe as slum no. 13 in ofﬁcial discourse. Indeed, Pierre Sudreau’s

Commissariat à la construction et à l’urbanisme had pronounced only two of

the neighborhood’s buildings viable. The rest “were in a state of deplorable

dereliction” and would be razed.

The visual narration attempted to literally

“show” how this assessment obscured and distorted the spatial forms and

social conditions of the neighborhood. The life stories reveal the neighbor-

hood’s human strength despite the sordid conditions. The ﬁlm’s narrator

assures us there is a “delicacy of life,” a solidarity and independence that

is often characteristic of the peuple. It can be found in the “heart of each

224 | chapter five

home” and makes these people proud of their neighborhood and their lives,

with little desire to leave. More than simply being photographed, the roles

in Chombart’s documentaries were acted by local residents who were then

taped at the ﬁlm’s end discussing with Chombart and his team their par-

ticipation and the presentation of their quartier. The last installment in the

series was a round-table debate among all the “actors” who had contributed

to the neighborhood portraits.

The case-study documentary functioned as a visual representation of

Chombart’s sociological research and an opportunity to act out his ideals

as a form of televised populist instruction. The inhabitants of this slum do

not live in a state of chaos and degeneracy, nor are their children born de-

linquents. They have tactics and speciﬁc skills that enable them to decipher

and negotiate their environment. Their lives are organized around socially

shaped spaces. Material conditions are difﬁcult, but, according to Chom-

bart, “social life is extremely active and warm-hearted. People seem happy,

which the ﬁlm portrays well.”

An interview with the local barber attests to

neighborhood solidarity. He recounts that they have all spent the last twenty

years watching Serge grow up. And so we meet Serge as a handsome young

man in a leather jacket who courts his bride-to-be, Anna, on his motorcycle.

The entire neighborhood prepares for their wedding, and they march in full

regalia through the courtyard to the church to exchange vows. The Serge

and Anna of Chombart’s sociological study have much in common with

Jacques Becker’s Antoine and Antoinette. Both couples represent a youthful

postwar generation, optimistic about their future despite the difﬁculties they

face. They are modish and independent. Although clearly working class, they

lack the traditional proletarian disposition of their parents. Yet they remain

attached to their neighborhood roots. Despite every effort to ﬁnd housing

in the beloved rue du Moulin de la Pointe where they have grown up, there

is nothing. The young couple are forced to leave behind their friends and

family for an HLM apartment in the suburbs.

What happened when people like Serge and Anna, alias Antoine and

Antoinette, moved out of the natural habitat of the quartier? In the series’s

next ﬁlm, La Butte à la Reine,

the Levavasseur family moves from the 13th

arrondissement as part of the slum-clearance operations to a new apartment

building in the suburban cité-jardin of La Butte à la Reine. They have waited

two years for this apartment, with its modern amenities, clean whitewashed

walls and balcony, and views of the countryside. Their children are mesmer-

paris as cinematic space | 225

ized as the kitchen appliances, purchased on credit, arrive. The apartment is

a visual depiction of the habitat norms that became standardized in public

housing as the “F” category system, especially the “F3” or 170-square-foot

three-room ﬂat, with well-equipped kitchen and bathroom and open to light

and air.

It was considered the summit of rational planning. Despite the

fact that Monsieur Levavasseur will commute an hour to work by train into

Paris, “their life has been transformed—a new mentality is born. The family

has joyously moved into their apartment and into the future.” But there are

problems. The old neighborhood in the 13th was sympathique. In La Butte

à la Reine there is little chance to meet the neighbors until they are faced

with a ﬂood in the building. There are hardly any local shops, and the prices

are too high. Most women travel back to Paris, to the Uniprix at Denfert

Rochereau, for food and provisions. But there is little connection between

the old city and the new cité-jardin. Despite hopes for a collective experience,

the new inhabitants began building fences with “private property” signs

around their building, which is renamed a résidence. Suburban life privatizes

and territorializes the Levavasseur family. They have been ripped away from

the natural sociability and support system of working-class neighborhood

life in Paris. The sense of community accommodation, their roots and true

identity, have all been lost.

All of these ﬁlms and television shows displayed optimism and enthusiasm

as well as ambivalence and apprehension about the future and the impact

of the trente glorieuses. The complicated textures of a disassembled city are

made visible. The viewer has time to gaze at the splintered physicality and

spaces of Paris, their vitality and persistence. We ﬁnd traces of memory and

the familiar in this cartography. And yet, more than just made observable,

vernacular spaces and sociability were produced as national pageantry in 1950s

ﬁlm and television. This was where the soul of the nation could be found.

These images constructed a ﬁctionalized, mediatized dream of urban com-

munity after years of civil conﬂict. Chombart’s television documentary was a

lyrical, aestheticized construction of Paris that left more than enough room for

illusion. The imagery was arresting. Life was graceful, full of feeling, hopeful

even in want. The presentation of social cohesion was so intensely poetic and

idealized that even the actors in Chombart’s version of neighborhood life in

La Rue du Moulin de la Pointe gently chastised the research team for ignoring

neighborhood conﬂicts and tensions.

The documentary’s imaginary magni-

ﬁed the hidden beauty of social life in these forgotten slum districts, creating