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Eclair in Epinay |
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By 1914 there were two Eclair studios in Epinay. The first, on the Avenue d'Enghien, was erected in the grounds of an eighteenth-century château and was in use from 1907 onwards. The second, on the Rue du Mont, was in the grounds of a former Jesuit-run retreat and had just been acquired by Eclair from Menchen films:
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the Eclair studio, Avenue d'Enghien
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the Menschen studio, Rue du Mont
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This is a photograph taken of filming in one of these studios in September 1916, though I can't tell which of them it is:
The entrance to the Menchen studio on the Rue du Mont can be seen in Victorin Jasset's 1912 film Bandits en automobile:
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Other nearby streets can be seen in this and other Eclair films. Here is the Rue Monribot, the next street along, eastwards, from the Rue du Mont, in Jasset's 1910 film Les Deux Poltrons:
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The Rue du Sentier, four streets along, eastwards, appears in Bandits en automobile and the first Protéa film:
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That Protéa film also uses what is now the mairie in Epinay, the former château of a king of Spain:
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The cart in which someone is hidden adds a local detail, having been borrowed from the Schaeffer boulangerie on the Rue de Paris.
At the top of the Rue du Mont is the Rue de l'Eglise, number 7 of which appears in Gavroche sculpteur pour rire:
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Opposite the church, at 50 Rue de Paris, was the gendarmerie:
It can be glimpsed in the background of this image from a now-lost film, Gavroche et sa belle-mère. The protagonists are on the Rue Monribot:
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The gendarmerie appears again in Bandits en automobiles, as a gendarmerie, surprisingly:
In the same film we also see one of Epinay's three railway stations, and much of its vicinity:
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I have spent some time trying to find a street that appears in three different films:
The street's recurrence suggest strongly proximity to the production base, but I have not found a match to those distinctive buildings on the right in any postcards. I have two theories. One is that this a street bordering or running through the grounds of the Avenue d'Enghien studio:
I haven't seen images of the Chemin des Saules, the Chemin des Anciens Prés, the Rue des Econdeaux or even of the Avenue d'Enghien, to know whether it is any of those. Here are images of the Avenue du Chemin de Fer, east of the estate:
This looks like the same type as my mystery street, and the view in the postcard to the right can be matched to a view in one of the films in which the mystery street appears:
Google Street View - 26 Avenue Jean-Jaurès
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My other theory is that the mystery street is in fact the Rue Mulot, and the two distinctive buildings have been heavily modified:
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This will remain a mere conjecture until I find an early twentieth-century image of the Rue Mulot.
As will be apparent, I have been looking for studio-local locations in a only very small number of films. Without the several finds in Bandits en automobile it would hardly be worth the trouble. (I discuss the locations of this film, as well as oter aspects, here.) I am optimistc that more Eclair films will become available for examination, and that then I shall be able to add a few more streets and buildings to those so far identified. Even in the available films and images there are a number of locations that suggest proximity to the studios but for which I have yet to find matches:
Film production continued in the Epinay studios long after the period that interests me here, and several films made there in more recent times have used Epinay itself as a location. The only examples I'll give here are from two films that both show the Rue du Mont studios: Jean Epstein's Le Lion des Moguls (1924) and Claude Zidi's L'Animal (1977). Both are films about filmmaking, and the studio buildings here represent themselves:
sources
There are far fewer Eclair films online than of the four other major companies in this period. Of the Eclair films I have ben able to see, these are those that I have used for this post:
Bandits en automobile (1912), Les Deux Poltrons (1910) and Protéa (1913)- all on YouTube
Gavroche sculpteur pour rire (1913), Gontran et le billet gratuit (1913) and an unidentified film with Paul Bertho are all on the DVD 'Les Comiques français des premiers temps', included in the September 2010 issue of 1895, edited by Laurent Guido and Laurent Le Forestier.
There are far fewer Eclair films online than of the four other major companies in this period. Of the Eclair films I have ben able to see, these are those that I have used for this post:
Bandits en automobile (1912), Les Deux Poltrons (1910) and Protéa (1913)- all on YouTube
Gavroche sculpteur pour rire (1913), Gontran et le billet gratuit (1913) and an unidentified film with Paul Bertho are all on the DVD 'Les Comiques français des premiers temps', included in the September 2010 issue of 1895, edited by Laurent Guido and Laurent Le Forestier.
other resources:
- Richard Abel, The Ciné Goes to Town: French Cinema 1896-1914 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994)
- Richard Abel (ed.), Encyclopedia of Early Cinema (Abingdon: Routledge, 2005)
- Gallica (Bibliothèque nationale de la France), for directory entries and maps: https://gallica.bnf.fr/
- Laurent Mannoni, 'Les studios Pathé de la région parisienne (1896-1914), in Michel Marie and Laurent Le Forestier (eds), La Firme Pathé frères, 1896-1914 (Paris: Association française de recherche sur l'histoire du cinéma, 2004)
- The Turconi Project: http://www.cinetecadelfriuli.org/progettoturconi/