"Paris which had always amused me on holiday, was too lovely ... It captured me with its pleasant carefreeness ... The night porter down in the plush entrance hall [of the hotel] ... invited me to a coup de rouge and prophesied "it will sort itself out, sir, I am sure of it. Everyone in the world has two fatherlands: his own and Paris."2
It is unlikely whether many of the émigrés themselves shared Max Ophuls' rhapsodic impressions (qtd. in MacDonald 1996, 101) regarding their place of exile but both of Siodmak's musical films, La Crise est finie and La Vie Parisienne, conform in different ways to the consolidating myth of Paris as a site of cosmopolitan belonging. Mauvaise graine also presents an image of the city as playground which when left becomes a sort of referential home. Where does this key notion of non-Parisians coming to Paris and being nurtured, exhilarated and dazzled by its attractions come from? The idea of Paris itself as a spectacle for visitors to consume and admire has as one of its main antecedents the development of the physical spaces of the city under Haussmann in the nineteenth century. Haussmann's redesign of Paris, with the more or less wholesale clearing and redevelopment of its central areas, effected two significant results regarding the way that the city could be viewed. Firstly, in architectural and thus also spatial terms the strategic urban panoramic view was developed. This led to an enhanced sense of promotional civic display based on the principles of seeing and looking. As Schwartz ( 1998, 2) puts it,
"visualising the city became synonymous with knowing it".1 Related to this typology was
Ti>r a further example of this mythologising see Josephine Baker's famous song J'at IX'UX amours. Schwartz's hook contains an extended and fascinating argument about the inter-relationship between 19th century Parisian spectacular forms such as the waxwork museum or urban panorama and the development of early cinema. She argues that "the visual representation of reality as spectacle in late 19th century Paris created a common culture and a sense of shared experiences through which people ... | imagined) themselves
participating in a metropolitan culture because they had visual evidence that such a shared world ... existed" (6). This meant that Parisians were in a position to bring "rich and complicated habits ol viewing and comprehensions of reality and its representations" ( 179) [a the cinema when it emerged. As with Rice's
the notion of the past belonging to darkness so that the emergence of widely distributed all- night street lighting, for example, served an allegorical, as well as a practical, function. Prendergast (1991, 183) argues, for example, that "The public provision of light represented a triumph over social and cultural "darkness"; light meant lumières in more than one sense; the project of the illuminated city became cognate with the idea of the enlightened city" (183). The second effect of Haussmannisation, largely as a result of this enhanced potential to be viewed, was a whole subsidiary set of social practices emerged to do with the way the city was not just experienced by its own residents but also imagined by those from afar. These ranged from the development of window displays in department stores (aided by the introduction of sheet glass and modulated lighting features) to the spread of photographic and lithographic reproductions of "sites of interest". Many of these stores or covered commercial arcades were on the grands boulevards which were located immediately south of three of the city's main train stations for visitors. This was the time of the spread of guidebooks for the traveller to Paris and, very importantly, the emergence of the picture postcard as a means of sending Paris as it was pictured to the provinces and overseas. The popularity of the spectacular view of the city was developed with the running series of Expositions Universelles , one of which in 1867 coincided with the first
production of Offenbach's operetta La Vie Parisienne.4 At such exhibitions the world came to Paris twice over: firstly, in the physical sense as paying visitors and then secondly, in the metaphorical sense in the form of such erected displays as the "Rue des Nations" (1878) with its facade of architectural styles from around the globe. Paris was then sent back to the world in the form of pictorial messages, most spectacularly in the example of the 1889 event when enthusiastic visitors could post Parisian images from the top of that recently erected emblem of urban modernity, the Eiffel Tower.*
recent work (1998) on 19th cenlury Parisian photography, however, there is surely a danger here of universalising visuality and urban experience to the detriment of understanding how all this viewing meant different things to different people.
^ Hie actual premiere of the operetta was on the 31st of October 1866 at the Palais Royal.
1900 EXPOSITION UNIVERSELLE
PARIS
EXPOSITION UNIVERSELLE
1900
Both the original production of La Vie Parisienne and Siodniak's loose adaptation refer explicitly to this idea of Paris defining itself both against the world as something distinctive and unique and within the world as the centre for a kind of communal
mark the 1X89 Exposition—Jules Bourdais's Tour Soleil. The Tour Soleil was planned to he equipped with enough arc-lighting to illuminate the entire capital. Other international public events designed to link Paris with light included the 1881 Paris Electricity Exhibition and the Palace of Electricity exhibit at the 19(H) Exposition Universelle. As Schivelbusch (1988) points out. Paris was, in fact, the centre of many of the
19th century’s technological light innovations. These included the creation of incandescent street lighting in
cosmopolitanism. It is surely not coincidental that both the theatrical and film production are the work of German émigré outsiders who found themselves producing work inside the capital about the capital.6 The plot of the Offenbach operetta concerns the entertaining amorous and mercenary entanglements of a visiting wealthy Brazilian baron, his wife and mistress and two scheming Parisian fortune-hunters. A key chorus by Meilhac and Halévy (1889, 20),which is reproduced in the 1935 film, gives an idea of the flavour of the way Paris was represented in the performance:
"Nous venons,/ArrivonsyDe tous les pays du monde,/Par la terre ou bien par
l'onde./Italiens,/Brésiliens, /Japonais,/Hollandais,/Espagnols,/Romagnols,/Egyptians,/Péru viens./Nous venons./Arrivons!/De tous les pays du monde,/Par la terre ou bien par l'onde,/Nous venons,/Arrivons,/La vapeur nous amène,/Nous allons envahir/La cité souveraine,/Le séjour du plaisir,/On accourt, on s'empresse,/Pour connaître, O Paris,/Pour connaître l'ivresse/De tes jours, de tes nuits./Tous les étrangers ravis/Vers toi s'élancent Paris!/Nous allons chanter/Nous allons crier/Nous allons souper/Nous allons aimer/Oh! Mon Dieu, nous allons tous/Nous amuser comme des fous."7
The film version of the operetta retains the cosmopolitan narrative hinge of the visiting wealthy colonial to the capital of pleasure but enlarges the range of entanglements by having Don Ramiro (Max Dearly) leave his mistress and Paris in 1900 and return in 1936 with his grand-daughter Helenita (Conchita Montenegro). In 1936 the exuberant Brazilian
6Jacques Offenbach was born in Cologne in IKI9, also of Jewish parents. He came to Paris in 1833 to train at the Conservatoire. In his book on Offenbach and Paris, Kracauer (1937) argues that the world of the Parisian boulevards suited Offenbach’s social status as a rootless foreigner. "They were both related in their nature", he suggests (75). "The boulevards were no home in the ordinary sense". Pheir striking characteristic was their "lack of anchorages". In some ways, Kracauer suggests, the operetta was, in fact, an eniigre product" (141). Did Robert Siodmak read Kraeauer's work? It was published in German the year that the film was made. There are striking descriptions throughout the text which recall scenes from the film. 7 We are eoming/Arriving/From all the countries of the world/By land or even by
air/ltalians/Brazilians/Dutch/Spanish/Gypsies/Egyptians/Peruvians/Wc are coming/Arrivingl/The steam leads us/We are going to invade/The sovereign city/Thc place ol pleasure/We rush, gather pace/To get to know Paris/To get to know drunkcnncss/And your days and your nights./AII delighted foreigners/Are rapidly moving lo Paris!/We are going to sing/We are going to shoul/We are going to dine/We are going to love/Oh my God, we're all going/To be cra/.y anil have fun".
is still up to his amorous indulgences and excessively energetic visits to entertainment venues. There are several key scenes set in hotel rooms or train stations which evoke the sense of Paris belonging not just to its residents but to the world. At significant
intersections in the plot of the film a postcard-like image is visualised to reinforce the dazzling spectacle of the city's world of light. After a scene set in a drab, functional 1936 immigration office, for example, an official moves to a window. Whilst opening the left shutter he declares: "This is Paris!" The right shutter opens of its own accord and dissolves into a panoramic night sky-line image of the city with the illuminated Eiffel Tower on the horizon and the rooftop of apartments in the foreground. To reinforce the picture element of the city, the camera tracks back slowly to frame the image with the inclusion of the
bordering element of the window. Before that the film had begun with a tableau shot of the theatre "La Vie Parisienne" at night-time again with the Eiffel Tower in the background and this time the twinkling features of the "City of Light" breaking up the darkness. The effect is of an instantly recognisable, almost iconic, display of "Parisianisme". It could be the cover of a guidebook from the period.
Mauvaise graine is another film interested in the notion of the city on display. It frequently uses postcard-like images of urban spaces such as the Pont Alexandre 111 or the Bois de Boulogne and has a developed sense of the city as an open-air site of play and leisure. Sections of the film such as the car chase at the beginning of the film, when Pusquier (Pierre Mingand) decides to steal a parked vehicle from under the eyes of a gang of car thieves, are perfect examples of how the film turns Paris into spectacle by integrating a sense of the space and freedom of the city with the modern sensations of speed and mobility. In his deft commentary on the development of new forms of perception in Paris under Haussmannisation, Schivelbusch (1986, 188-197) has argued that the department store and railway journey developed a "panoramic" mode of viewing so that the object
impressionistically" (189). This effect is managed in the film by a range of fluid points of view. For example, as the chase begins, the camera is placed on the bonnet of the crooks' car looking in front at the speeding véhiculé. We then rapidly cut across space, but in the same time continuum, to a view from the rear seat of Pasquier's car. As well as seeing him from behind we also see his face in the rear mirror as the city speeds by in a blur. This tightness of vision is later contrasted with alternate panoramic views which include a spectacular extreme high wide-angle shot of the two véhiculés maneuvering across the space of an open square and differing positioning of the moving car in relation to the mobility of the frame. This gauging of space and motion allows Wilder to integrate more fully the exhilaration of the chase with the freedom of seeing rapidly changing vistas of the city flash by. Most "spectacular" of all is when the camera is planted on the bonnet of the lead véhiculé looking out and we have, therefore, a visceral sense o f new forward-driven space constantly emerging into the frame to reveal the sights of a city in transit.
Towards the end of Mauvaise graine there is another chase scene which involves the Parisian police following their quarry, Jean la cravatte (Raymond Galle), by means of that iconic pictorial representation of the city, the map of the Metro system. Previous to that we have seen Pasquier and his girlfriend Jeannette's (Danielle Darrieux) escape from the city actually mapped on screen with the movement of the camera across the map of France mimicking the couple's "real" geographical relationship to the capital. La Crise est finie. Siodmak's first émigré musical, begins with another journey to Paris by non-Parisians (a provincial troupe of down-on-their-heels theatrical performers) but it also entails a conflation of movement and a certain commodified or standardised imagining of the city.s Alter an umpteenth lacklustre performance of their stage number entitled "On ne voit ça qua Paris" ("You Only See That in Paris"), and dismissal by their manager, the group
"See Schivclbusch (1986. l97)on how the development of the railway removed "spatially individual or autonomous" localities and produeed a new inter-relationship between the consumer commodity and the subject's sense of place.
E
actually decide to seek their fortunes in the capital. It is clear that for the younger members Paris exists only as a representation. "Do you know Paris?" one asks. "Only as a view in a painting" another replies. "I am afraid of Paris" claims one girl. The troupe shout their denial and the girl's wail continues as the camera swish pans from the backstage area of a
provincial theatre to a painted backdrop of trees ( See La Crise est finie Fig. 1.1-
1.2). This scenery begins to rotate as a train's steam whistle is heard. We also hear the
sound of the train engine picking up and the beginning of the refrain from the previous number. As the pace of the music increases in time with the train, the artificial scenery dissolves into a blurred vision of speed taken from a real window of a railway carriage
(Fig. 1.3). The second, far more exuberant, version of "On ne voit ça qu’à Paris" which
now follows, underlines the pleasures, delights (and dangers) of the capital that the troupe will apparently encounter. By means of a witty montage of short dramatic inserts the ideas that the lyrics refer to are visualised on screen. As we see the scenery passing by, Madame Olga (Suzanne Dehelly)'s voice starts singing "Aucune ville n'est aussi romantique que Paris/Montmartre et Montparnasse sont des paradis"9 Siodmak cuts to a shot in which the camera moves from the window pane of the carriage to rest on four seated figures: a male, Olga, Marcel (Albert Préjean) and Nicole (Danielle Darrieux). They are pictured in a state of communal imagining and anticipation. Olga, given the voice of maturity and experience, continues in full swing: "Les jeunes y vivent d'amour et d'eau fraîche et l'on se dit/On se voit ça qu’à Paris"10 (Fig. 1.4 and 1.6). With the very youthful Nicole listening and smiling, Marcel continues spinning the myth: "Tous les jours 100.000 taxis circulent et font du bmit/Le soir 100.000 lumières font oublier la nuit/Et 100.000 jolies filles font des rêves jolis/On ne voit ça qu'à Paris"11 He continues: "Les apaches sont polis, leurs gestes sont précis/Après avoir tout pris, ils vous disent merci/Aucune ville n'est aussi romantique que Paris/Montmartre et Montparnasse sont des paradis/On se dit en voyant tous ces chants et * 111
"No lown is as romantic as Paris/Montmartre and Montparnasse are paradise".
111 "The young live there on love and fresh water and one says to oneself/You only see that in Paris." ""Every day lOO.tXX) taxis go around making noise/In the evening KX).(XX) lights make you torget the night/And l(X), (XX) pretty girls have sweet dreams/You only see that in Paris".
ces cris/On se voit ça qu'à Paris".12 The succession of studio-bound images relating to the words of the song are very obviously artificial and thus bear out the impression of distance from the "real" city (Fig. 1.5).
C E R E C U E ÎL CO N TÎE N T DEUX GRANDS SUCCES CRÉÉS PAR