the Canal de l'Ourcq in films, 1901-1913
1/ Zecca in Pantin
Ferdinand Zecca's 1901 Pathé film Plongeur fantastique may no longer be considered 'the first film to make use of reversed movement' (C.W. Ceram, Archaeology of the Cinema, 1965, p.239), but for the writer of this post it is still a significant first, the first film I have found that makes use of the Canal de l'Ourcq as a location:
The location was mentioned by Zecca in a retrospective interview in 1946, though he didn't say where exactly along the canal's eighty-seven kilometres (as it was in 1901) he filmed. He didn't in fact go very far up the canal, filming in front of a canal-side residence in Pantin, just beneath the 'i' of Pantin on the map above. The postcard below is from 'Au fil de l'Ourcq', a wonderful website devoted to documenting and promoting the Canal de l'Ourcq. It has been invaluable to me in the research for this post:
Zecca's 1902 film La Pêche miraculeuse features two fishermen who pull the same fish from the water and fight over it, both falling into the canal. A third fisherman comes along with his wife, and they too end up in the water; all four return to the bank through the use of reversed movement. According to Zecca this film was also filmed by the Canal de l'Ourcq, but there are no buildings to help identify where exactly:
A copy of this film has been posted on YouTube by the Filmoteca Española.
On the 'Collections' page of the Fondation Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé website is a production still for a film also called La Pêche miraculeuse which seems to have a slightly different plot and has a completely different background:
On the 'Collections' page of the Fondation Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé website is a production still for a film also called La Pêche miraculeuse which seems to have a slightly different plot and has a completely different background:
A very similar background to the above was used for the 1901 film Baignade impossible, for which I have found two different images. The first is a frame grab posted on the website of the CNC; the second is a production still from the website of the Fondation Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé:
These two images were taken at different distances from the barge, and the barge seems to be lower in the water in the first of them, but both images fit with the plot summary given for the film:
'This scene represents a bather endeavoring to divest himself of his clothes and spend a pleasant half hour in the water. He no sooner takes off his coat, than he finds another one one on in its place and gets quite a heap of hats, coats, waistcoats, and trousers strewed around him. Finally he manages to undress but just as he takes the plunge he rebounds on to the side fully dressed. Becoming desperate he jumps into the water with his clothes on.'
Whereas the two La Pêche miraculeuse images are from two different films, I think that the two Baignade impossible images are from the same film, with the production still taken at a different moment, and with the actor - Zecca himself, according to Georges Sadoul - possibly on a different barge.
'This scene represents a bather endeavoring to divest himself of his clothes and spend a pleasant half hour in the water. He no sooner takes off his coat, than he finds another one one on in its place and gets quite a heap of hats, coats, waistcoats, and trousers strewed around him. Finally he manages to undress but just as he takes the plunge he rebounds on to the side fully dressed. Becoming desperate he jumps into the water with his clothes on.'
Whereas the two La Pêche miraculeuse images are from two different films, I think that the two Baignade impossible images are from the same film, with the production still taken at a different moment, and with the actor - Zecca himself, according to Georges Sadoul - possibly on a different barge.
The bigger question, for the purposes of this post, is whether these three images are of the Canal de l'Ourcq:
When Zecca says, in the quotation at the head of this post, that he filmed La Pêche miraculeuse at the Canal de l'Ourcq, he could be referring only to the first one, as posted by the Filmoteca Española, but he also implies that La Baignade impossible was not filmed in the studio. The background of that film looks a little like a painted landscape, but the grass and trees look real to me, as do the barges. The Canal de l'Ourcq used specially designed barges, called flûtes; at 2.70 metres they were narrow enough to serve on what is a relatively narrow canal. They were between 28 and 34 metres long, though there were also demi-flûtes that were only 16 metres long. Even if Zecca used a demi-flûte, I don't see him transporting a real one to the studio, and it is clear that this is a real Canal de l'Ourcq barge:
Less conclusive than the authentic barge, but to my mind still persuasive, is the authentic-looking pile of stones behind the anglers, very like the pile in this postcard:
I am close to sure that the water in those three images is that of the canal, not that of a studio tank.
And if I had to make a guess as to where on the canal those images were made, it would be that Zecca had returned to the place where he filmed the Plongeur fantastique. Here again is that location, showing the house in front of which his diver (himself?) went into the canal:
And if I had to make a guess as to where on the canal those images were made, it would be that Zecca had returned to the place where he filmed the Plongeur fantastique. Here again is that location, showing the house in front of which his diver (himself?) went into the canal:
And this postcard shows the trees next to the house:
We can see that there are two lines of trees, as in the 'Pêche' and 'Baigneur' images, and that as in those images there is open land beyond them. This is where I think Zecca made Baignade impossible and one version of La Pêche miraculeuse.
It doesn't count as evidence, but here is my alignment of the backgrounds in those three images:
It doesn't count as evidence, but here is my alignment of the backgrounds in those three images:
Poursuite accidentée (1903), a film that may also be by Zecca, also uses reversed movement and has a canal-side setting, indubitably a real one:
Again, there is not enough background detail to help identify where this is on the Canal de l'Ourcq, if indeed it is there. This film can also be viewed on YouTube, thanks to the Filmoteca Española.
2/ from Bondy to Sevran and back to Pantin
In 1905 Segundo de Chomón remade Zecca's Plongeur fantastique, again using reversed movement and filming again on the Canal de l'Ourcq, but this time over five kilometres further east:
This is a bridge at the point where Bondy becomes Les Pavillons-sous-Bois, known as the Pont de la Forêt or the Pont Gaucher:
Chomón was here again in 1905, working on Charles-Lucien Lépine's Vot'permis? cours après!:
In Aux sources de l'industrie du cinéma: le modèle Pathé (p.299), Laurent Le Forestier notes that this same bridge, framed in the same way, appears two years later in the Pathé film L'Attaque du roulier.
Zecca himself used the bridge for the 1905 version of L'Incendiaire:
It also appears in films by other companies, as here, in Gaumont's Onésime et le nourrisson, from 1912:
Below are images from two Eclipse productions, also from 1912, Arthème Dupin échappe encore and Les Aventures de Fifi:
Locations along the Canal de l'Ourcq were not, clearly, the preserve of a single company, nor even just of companies like Pathé and Gaumont, based on the east side of Paris. Eclipse's filmmakers came all the way from Courbevoie, travelling more than twice as far as their homologues at Gaumont and Pathé:
Why they would go to such trouble needs explaining. The Canal de l'Ourcq sequence from Arthème Dupin échappe encore shows Arthème being thrown into the canal by two policemen, and then, via reversed movement, he is seen jumping back onto the bridge:
A tempting explanation is that the filmmakers came to Bondy to pay homage to Segundo de Chomón's fantastic diver from seven years before:
Which would mean, likewise, that when, in Onésime et le nourrisson, a baby is thrown from the same bridge and projected back out of the water, that too must be a homage to Chomón's use of reversed movement in the same place:
This explanation seems highly unlikely. What brought all of these filmmakers to the Canal de l'Ourcq is, I think, something more simple: the dimensions of the canal itself. It isn't very deep, generally about 1.5 metres and in places much less. In Alice Guy's Le Billet de banque (Gaumont 1906), a character is sitting down to wash himself in the gare d'eau of the canal:
The shallowness of the canal makes it much safer for water-related scenes than would be the Seine or, in most places, the Marne.
The width too is a factor, around ten metres, allowing for a camera-position on the opposite bank close enough to register the action clearly, as in Zecca's first Ourcq films, or here in Vot'permis, cours après (Pathé 1905) and Calino a mangé du cheval (Pathé 1908):
The width too is a factor, around ten metres, allowing for a camera-position on the opposite bank close enough to register the action clearly, as in Zecca's first Ourcq films, or here in Vot'permis, cours après (Pathé 1905) and Calino a mangé du cheval (Pathé 1908):
I don't know where on the canal is the first of these, but the second is Bondy, on the path next to the Pont d'Aulnay:
The bridge appears in Onésime contre Onésime (Gaumont 1912) as the stage for an impressive double somersault dive into the canal:
As well as the Pont Gaucher and the Pont d'Aulnay there was the Pont de Bondy, to the west where Bondy meets Noisy-le-Sec:
The keen-eyed will have spotted that the Pont de Bondy looks very much like the Pont Gaucher. They are drawbridges of identical design, and the only way I have been able to work out which of the two is in which film is by looking at nearby buildings and trees, and at the patterns and blemishes of the stonework. |
Below left is the Pont de Bondy in Guy's Le Billet de banque (Gaumont 1906); below right is the Pont Gaucher in Durand's Onésime et le nourrisson (1912):
Without the 'Au fil de l'Ourcq' website I would not have realised that there were two similar but different bridges in the area. There are also two gares d'eau, lay-bys for barges, but these are not so easily confused.
On the left is the one near the Pont de Bondy, from Le Billet de banque; on the right, from La Disparition d'Onésime (1913), is - I am almost sure - the one near the Pont Gaucher:
On the left is the one near the Pont de Bondy, from Le Billet de banque; on the right, from La Disparition d'Onésime (1913), is - I am almost sure - the one near the Pont Gaucher:
So far that makes six different film locations in this two-kilometre stretch of the Canal de l'Ourcq:
The cross at the far right is for a scene in another Eclipse film, Le Piquenique d'Arthème:
Of the remaining Ourcq-canal locations I have found in films of this period, two are four kilometres further east, at Sevran. The last exterior of Calino polygame (Gaumont 1911) has the protagonist dive into the canal from a bridge, accompanied by a man who seems to have been contemplating suicide and followed by Calino's four wives and then three rescuers, totalling nine people in the water beneath the Pont du Canal:
The contrast between Durand's comic chase film and Feuillade's 'Life as it is' melodrama Le Roi Lear au village, both 1911 Gaumont productions, is coincidental but striking. Feuillade's film is almost all interiors for its first fourteen minutes, but it closes with a single shot of the old man crossing this same bridge, contemplating suicide, before he is found by the film's Cordelia-figure:
The shot closes with a view from the bridge down towards the canal, where by chance or careful timing a barge dragged by four horses is slowly advancing, a view that matches the picturesque quality aspired to by contemporary postcard makers:
The building in the foreground of the postcard above and in the mid-ground of the shot from Calino polygame is a platrière. The last location I can identify along the Canal de l'Ourcq takes us back to Pantin and another plaster works:
The Pont des Limites, here, is the location for the three-shot closing sequence of Emile Cohl's Jobard portefaix par amour (Pathé 1911):
By coincidence this sequence also uses the reverse movement initiated by Zecca twelve years before in Plongeur fantastique, just metres from here. The two men throw the trunk, containing Jobard, into the canal but it bounces straight back into their arms:
One striking contrast between Zecca's Ourcq-Pantin film from 1901 and Cohl's is the latter's greater interest in the space that frames the action. As much as the canal-side domicile used by Zecca can appear picturesque in a postcard, for him it is just a convenient place to shoot a water-related trick film:
The blandness of the backdrop to Zecca's other early Ourcq films confirms his indifference to the pictorial qualities of these locations. For Cohl, on the other hand, the visual variety of his Ourcq-Pantin sequence is informed not only by variations in distance from his characters but also by varied framings of the space around them.
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A large part of the difference comes from the abandonment of frontality between 1901 and 1911 - even Chomón's one-position remake of Zecca's film in 1905 views the diver from an angle, when the camera could easily have been placed squarely in front of him. Though I can't say with confidence that the composition-practices of postcard-makers were an influence on the shift away from frontality, it does seem to be more than a coincidence that Cohl's composition here matches exactly that of the postcard below:
In a number of films there are stretches of water that look like they could be the Canal de l'Ourcq, without allowing a positive identification. Even if the Pont Gaucher in Vot'permis, cours après! can be recognised, we can't say for sure that these two canal views in the same film are nearby - though there was a saw-mill by the canal in Bondy:
These two views from Chomon's Slippery Jim (Pathé 1908) are very Ourcq-ish:
Those are canal-like features in the back projections of Les Voleurs noctambules (Pathé 1908):
This, from the 1911 Pathé film Une femme trop aimante, looks like a canal more than a river:
This stretch of canal, from Les Ruses du cambrioleur (Pathé 1907), could I suppose be any canal, but the most likely is the Canal de l'Ourcq:
These views below, both from Gaumont films, are definitely of the Canal de l'Ourcq, even if in the first the canal is supposed to pass for a river in the Wild West:
In every case I have found the Canal de l'Ourcq is a generic location, a setting for water-related mishap without topographical specificity. Only Vot'permis, cours après has a wholly rural setting, with which the canal fits well, and only in Le Piquenique d'Arthème does the canal make both narrative and topographical sense. Arthème and his wife set out for a picnic from their suburban home (probably in Courbevoie), but miss their train at the Gare de Javel, in Paris. They take a cab and finish by the Canal de l'Ourcq at Les Pavillons-sous-Bois, an ideal destination for a leisurely outing, as these postcards indicate:
They find a good spot but before they can enjoy their picnic they are dogpiled by rugby players chasing a ball:
The rugbymen continue their game by diving into the canal after the ball, and then we see that the picnic site is across from some sort of industrial site:
Two children then suspend a scarecrow above Arthème and his wife who, thinking it is a hanged man, run away and the children steal their picnic.
Here, crudely mapped, are this and other places along the Canal de l'Ourcq seen in some Pathé, Gaumont and Eclipse films from between 1901 and 1913:
3/ canal v. river
oMost of these scenes could only have been staged on the Canal de l'Ourcq. The width, depth and current of rivers would in general rule them out as locations.
It is true that there were other canals: on reaching Paris the Canal de l'Ourcq connects with the Canal Saint Martin and the Canal Saint Denis, but these are hardly ever used as locations, probably because the traffic on these canals was considerably greater, making it difficult to stage there the kinds of scenes we have seen set on the Canal de l'Ourcq.
One feature the Canal de l'Ourcq lacked in this period was locks, at least for the first thirty kilometres, which would be why, for Une heroine de quatre ans (1907), Alice Guy went to the Canal Saint Denis for the scene where the little girl saves a blind man who is about to fall into the canal:
It is true that there were other canals: on reaching Paris the Canal de l'Ourcq connects with the Canal Saint Martin and the Canal Saint Denis, but these are hardly ever used as locations, probably because the traffic on these canals was considerably greater, making it difficult to stage there the kinds of scenes we have seen set on the Canal de l'Ourcq.
One feature the Canal de l'Ourcq lacked in this period was locks, at least for the first thirty kilometres, which would be why, for Une heroine de quatre ans (1907), Alice Guy went to the Canal Saint Denis for the scene where the little girl saves a blind man who is about to fall into the canal:
For a similar setting Ernest Servaës at Eclipse used a sluice gate quite near to the studio, on the Seine at Suresne, in Polycarpe fait de la morale au centimetre (1914):
Le Piquenique d'Arthème is, as I have said, the only film I have found so far that thematises its canal-side location, a kind of thematisation more common with riverside locations. By 1912, leisure time spent by the river is becoming a familiar narrative pretext, for example in Rigadin's films made near his home at La Varenne, on the Marne, or Léonce Perret's films made at Samois-sur-Seine.
Rivers are less likely to be straight than canals, their widths vary more, and in general they provide more visual options to the location finder. Canals can be incongruous in historical or rustic settings, and rivers have pictorial qualities better suited to romance:
There are more basic actions that are also better set by a river, as in these views of women washing clothes, both from Eclipse films. The second of these, filmed at Nogent-sur-Marne, shows its protagonist rolling into the water, an action that is easier to stage with rivers rather than canals, since the banks of canals must be flat to allow for towing:
Nogent-sur-Marne was a favourite riverside resort, in reality and in films, though it was also used as a location by films uninterested in its leisure facilities. The 'petit bras de la Marne' there was narrow and shallow enough to serve purposes similar to those served by canals. Calino a mangé du cheval illustrates this neatly, showing the cart-pulling protagonist enter the water of the Canal de l'Ourcq at Bondy and emerge from the water of the River Marne at Nogent:
In a scene re-enacted four years later on the Canal de l'Ourcq's Pont Gaucher for Arthème Dupin échappe encore, the protagonist of Slippery Jim is put in a sack and thrown by British policemen into the Marne, just to the left of what we see in the image above right:
All along the Marne film companies found locations for water-related action, favouring river over canal as more visually striking. I haven't yet fully researched these locations, but here is a sample, some identified as Marne-side, others I just think likely to be so:
My research into the locations seen in early French studio productions always starts with each company's territory, the streets near the studios in Vincennes or Montreuil or Belleville or Le Petit Montrouge or Courbevoie or Neuilly or Boulogne or Epinay (the last three all -sur-Seine).
Paris's landmarks and monuments are locations made use of by all studios, regardless of relative proximity to the studio's base, which was usually suburban. Here is the Place de l'Opéra in films by Gaumont, Pathé and Eclipse:
The Arc de Triomphe in films by Eclipse, Gaumont and Pathé:
The Place de la Concorde in films by Pathé, Eclair and Gaumont:
And the Eiffel Tower in films by Gaumont, Eclipse and Lux:
The Canal de l'Ourcq as location sits between on the one side immediately identifiable landmarks such as these and, on the other, the wholly anonymous and generic streets, buildings and shopfronts to be found in the vicinity of the studio.
As a generic but eventually identifiable space the canal is like railway stations, town halls and parks in films of this period, except that such spaces can usually be found close to the studio, whereas the specific characteristics of the Canal de l'Ourcq, a shallow but river-like stretch of water, are hard to find elsewhere in the Paris region.
The corpus of films illustrated in this post constitutes the cinematic heyday of the suburban Canal de l'Ourcq. The aquatic charms of Pantin, Noisy-le-Sec, Bobigny, Bondy, Les Pavillons-sous-Bois, Freinville and Sevran seen to have stopped attracting filmmakers by 1914.
One striking exception is Jean Vigo, who filmed parts of L'Atalante in 1933 on the Canal de l'Ourcq, including the port at Pantin:
As a generic but eventually identifiable space the canal is like railway stations, town halls and parks in films of this period, except that such spaces can usually be found close to the studio, whereas the specific characteristics of the Canal de l'Ourcq, a shallow but river-like stretch of water, are hard to find elsewhere in the Paris region.
The corpus of films illustrated in this post constitutes the cinematic heyday of the suburban Canal de l'Ourcq. The aquatic charms of Pantin, Noisy-le-Sec, Bobigny, Bondy, Les Pavillons-sous-Bois, Freinville and Sevran seen to have stopped attracting filmmakers by 1914.
One striking exception is Jean Vigo, who filmed parts of L'Atalante in 1933 on the Canal de l'Ourcq, including the port at Pantin:
The Parisian part of the Canal de l'Ourcq has remained a constant in French cinema. Whereas the attraction of the canal extra muros was chiefly practical, its attraction within Paris has been, as these images below illustrate, chiefly aesthetic:
Many of the films referred to in this post were viewed at the Gaumont Pathé Archives. Postcards of the kind used as illustrations can be purchased at delcampe.net.
Some of the films referred to can be viewed online:
La Pêche miraculeuse (Pathé 1902)
Poursuite accidentée (Pathé 1903)
Plongeur fantastique (Pathé 1905)
Arthème Dupin échappe encore (Eclipse 1912)
Le Piquenique d'Arthème (Eclipse 1912)
Some of the films referred to can be viewed online:
La Pêche miraculeuse (Pathé 1902)
Poursuite accidentée (Pathé 1903)
Plongeur fantastique (Pathé 1905)
Arthème Dupin échappe encore (Eclipse 1912)
Le Piquenique d'Arthème (Eclipse 1912)