Bresson in Paris c.1959 - mapping Pickpocket
In Henri Verneuil's sketch 'L'Adultère', from La Française et l'amour (1960), Dany Robin and Jean-Paul Belmondo
leave the Madeleine cinema, 14 Boulevard de la Madeleine, and walk up the Rue Vignon, having just seen 'un film d'avant-garde'.
leave the Madeleine cinema, 14 Boulevard de la Madeleine, and walk up the Rue Vignon, having just seen 'un film d'avant-garde'.
There are maps at the headquarters of the Police judiciaire, Quai des Orfèvres:
And there is a map at Varenne métro station:
Both of these places with maps in the film are on the map of the film:
The first and last exteriors of Pickpocket are at Longchamp, with some overlap of parts shown but mostly different views of the race course:
The pattern created by the return to Longchamp shows topography serving narrative closure, but there are other topographical dynamics at work in the film that are either resolved differently or left unresolved.
The two major and recurrent sites of Michel's activity are Longchamp, west of Paris, and the Gare de Lyon, towards the east:
The two major and recurrent sites of Michel's activity are Longchamp, west of Paris, and the Gare de Lyon, towards the east:
Between these we see him at work with his associate on two different streets, on the Boulevard des Capucines and outside a bank on the Boulevard Haussmann:
The impression of a wide territory covered is reinforced by the three Métro episodes. The first shows Michel get on a train at an unidentified station, apparently heading for an address given to him where he might find work. In the train he notices one man stealing another's wallet:
In the second episode Michel himself steals a wallet. The train is on ligne 14, Invalides to Porte de Vanves, and he gets off at the station Varenne:
The third episode combines two Métro sequences, linked by a dissolve, representing his activity over a whole week. The narration specifies that Michel had 'taken care to vary the journeys, travelling sometimes on one line, sometimes on another':
At the end he is confronted by a man whose wallet he has stolen and, after returning it, Michel runs out of the station. We can see that he leaves by the same doors that he came in by in the first Métro episode; despite the claim to have varied the Métro locations, the episodes begin and end in the same place:
My guess is that all of the station scenes were shot at the one identified place, Varenne, though there would be no point testing this by what the station looks like now since it is much transformed - the platforms are littered with Rodin statues:
Michel's local station is Saint Michel, not Varenne. He lives in a top-floor room at 9 Quai Saint Michel:
On the Ile de la Cité, immediately opposite his building, is the Préfecture de Police, and further along is 36 Quai des Orfèvres, the Police judiciaire headquarters, where he is taken after being arrested at Longchamp at the beginning of the film:
(See here for films that show the Quai des Orfèvres in more detail.)
That the pickpocket lives opposite these centres of police administration is probably the most calculated topographical opposition in the film. Narratively it goes to explain why the police inspector who first questioned him frequents the same café as Michel, engaging in conversation there with him and his friend Jacques:
That the pickpocket lives opposite these centres of police administration is probably the most calculated topographical opposition in the film. Narratively it goes to explain why the police inspector who first questioned him frequents the same café as Michel, engaging in conversation there with him and his friend Jacques:
Though there aren't any direct clues to the identification of this café, we can establish that it is Le Mahieu on the Rue Soufflot. The striped canopy of the café across the street looks very much like that of the Capoulade (aka Taverne du Panthéon), as seen the same year in Rohmer's Le Signe du Lion:
And from inside the café there is a glimpse of an awning on which can be read (when the image is reversed) CAFE-TABAC, P.M.U. and the letters E and M of LE MAHIEU, matching the awning seen (below right) in Les Lâches vivent d'espoir (Claude Bernard-Aubert 1960):
There are three other cafés in Pickpocket, one of which is explicitly localised: 'It was there, in that little café de Rochechouart, that I learnt most of my tricks.' Michel follows a man who had been hanging around his building, firstly onto a bus at the Quai Saint Michel and then into a café. The bus is a number 38 going to Place Pigalle, which doesn't correspond to that bus's itinerary at the time, but that destination is near the café, which is at 1 Boulevard de Clichy, just where that boulevard joins the Boulevard de Rochechouart.
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On the two occasions when Michel walks into the café we can see behind him the Brasserie de la Cigale and the Royal Bar at 124 Boulevard de Rochechouart:
The café where Michel makes the acquaintance of other thieves was, and is still, called Au Rendez Vous des Artistes:
There are some production stills viewable at Getty Images showing Bresson at work in this café:
The third café is seen only once, when Michel, Jacques and Jeanne go the the fair:
The consensus among commentators is that this is the Foire du Trône on the Cours de Vincennes, in the 12e arrondissement. The film shows nothing of the fair itself save the attraction reflected in the window behind Michel and Jeanne in the first of the images above, though there is a publicity still showing an unused scene with Jeanne and Jacques at a shooting gallery. |
The fourth café is located in an unspecified banlieue, immediately opposite the place where Michel has found work:
A poster in the café window for a production of J'y suis ... j'y reste at the Théâtre de l'Européen suggests that this is somewhere in or near the 17e arrondissement, since that is the district of that theatre, but the evidence is hardly conclusive. The vagueness of this suburban setting contrasts with that of the one major location I have yet to discuss, the home of Michel's mother, in an apartment building where throughout the film also lives Jeanne. Michel visits his mother's home twice, and each time very specific information is given about the location:
The bus stop reads 'Châtillon, Rue de Paris' and '195'. The bus he gets each time is indeed the 195, which did indeed pass through Châtillon on its journeys between the Porte d'Orléans in Paris and the Butte Rouge cité jardins at Chatenay-Malabry:
However, there are several problems with the specific information provided in these two sequences. Firstly, there is not, and wasn't at the time, a 'Rue de Paris' in Châtillon. There is an Avenue de Paris, but a bus stop would not have had the wrong name on it, however similar. Secondly, Michel arrives each time by the 195 bus, the first time coming from the left and the second from the right; he could of course be coming the first time from Paris and the second time from Clamart or Fontenay or Le Plessis Robinson or Chatenay-Malabry, but the problem is that each time the bus stops on the near side of the street, whereas the second time it should have stopped across the street:
It is the same bus on each occasion, with the same conductor, and at least two passengers are on the bus both times, wearing the same clothes.
The bus stop is the same each time, but in the interval between Michel's two visits it has moved. The first time it is closer to the building behind, the second time it is closer to the kerb:
The bus stop is the same each time, but in the interval between Michel's two visits it has moved. The first time it is closer to the building behind, the second time it is closer to the kerb:
Also - and this is what has confused me most here - the entrance to the building across the street changes. Each time, the camera is inside the building Michel is coming towards, and we can see from the wall decoration that it is the same building, so the only explanation is either that the whole thing is a set, or that the slight change in the camera's angle means we see a different part of the same street each time. The moveable bus stop is definitely a prop, but I do think this is a genuine tawdry suburban street and not a studio construction. If it is a real street it will have been closed off to allow the bus to go back and forth in disregard of the highway code, and to keep out stray traffic. Here, arranged left to right, is what we see of the street:
I shan't be able to resolve this enigma fully until I find a match for these two doorways, and seeing as I don't even know whether this is Paris or the banlieue, I doubt if I'll get very far in the search:
It remains, of course, that narratively Michel's mother and Jeanne live in Châtillon, beyond the city limits, whereas Michel lives at the city's centre, so that topographically the domiciles in the film map an urban-suburban opposition. That opposition is restated in Bresson's later Paris films, particularly in Une femme douce and Quatre nuits d'un rêveur.
A post on the topography of those films is coming soon.
A post on the topography of those films is coming soon.