preamble
Les Distractions (Jacques Dupont 1960)
Walking down a street remembered from the movies is not an innocent or spontaneous pleasure: I plan where to walk and what to remember. The stock of memories to be drawn on has already been noted and annotated. I know what to look for and know what there is no point in looking for, what is no longer there from that remembered scene. I plan, too, how to look: ambling down the Champs-Elysées, remembering A bout de souffle, could I look as Belmondo had looked? Would I see the things he’d seen? Not Seberg, of course, or other such contingencies, but some more permanent things: shopfronts, street-furniture, the Arc de Triomphe…
Les Distractions (Jacques Dupont 1960)
Walking down a street walked down in a film I remember, if it is to add up to a cine-memory, requires more than following in footsteps. My memory must be a camera, panning or tracking, placed at a distance from and at an angle to me. And surely the remembrancer should be dressed like the thing remembered (gangster hat, tweed jacket, silk socks), smoking his cigarettes.
A bout de souffle (Jean-Luc Godard 1960)
Almost every place on film discussed here I have visited, mostly after and sometimes before. Filming and walking are related activities, but the siblings gathered here are the film (freeze-framed) and the act of stopping and looking, no – the fact of having stopped and looked. On site I haven’t walked, panned or tracked, but generally stood immobile before whatever from the film is still there, and looked at it (sometimes I have photographed it).
The revisited place has emptied, the stars have departed. Their absence now allows us to discount their presence then: the films considered here are idealised as films without people, as if every Paris film was made like Duras's Les Mains négatives or Lelouch's C'était un rendezvous, in an empty city, or as if every London filmmaker, from Robert Paul in 1898 to Christopher Nolan now, had shot in the emptied streets of The Day the Earth Caught Fire or 28 Days Later.
The stars have departed, and sometimes so have more permanent things, like buildings. We mourn for what is lost and are glad for what survives.
The stars have departed, and sometimes so have more permanent things, like buildings. We mourn for what is lost and are glad for what survives.
La Jetée (Chris Marker 1962)
The research here is not all fieldwork. In large part, indeed, the paths once traced in films have been retraced not in the real but on maps, the cine-tourist’s sinecure. When used in combination with period phone directories, tourist guides, architectural plans and photographic studies, maps are repositories of a real that time or cinema cannot ruin. Thanks to them, the world so evidently there on the screen has had its existence confirmed by reference to exact documentation.
I hope this doesn't end up as one more discussion of cities and cinema, but since I also want this to be about places I have known, or at least looked at (in reality and on screen), and since mostly I have lived in and looked at cities, then inevitably this site is about the cinematic city. The pattern is varied by occasional visits to cinematic suburbs, small towns, villages and countryside. And, furthermore, if this research is mainly about the specificity of place, it is also attentive to the specificities of time: I am as curious about the when of a screen scene as about the where. An amble down the Champs Elysées is, after all, as much a movement in time as in place.
Il nuovo mondo (Jean-Luc Godard 1963)
