New Wave Newness: architecture in Paris

New Wave Newness: architecture in and around Paris

'Il mondo nuovo' (Jean-Luc Godard 1963)

Various types of new building figure in New Wave films. This post looks at those types - housing; university buildings; business, industry and technology; airports - in the context of thematic preoccupations - construction; the opposition of new and old; the visual appeal of new buildings, etc. Where I can I shall identify the buildings referred to, but the object in this post is more to identify the types of reference made, enabling an eventual general account of the New Wave's engagement with new architecture.

I have included in my corpus a few para-New Wave films, especially Alexandre Astruc's La Proie pour l'ombre (1961), rich in new architecture and in comment thereon. It is one of only two films in the corpus with an architect as protagonist. The other is Eric Rohmer's La Sonate à Kreutzer (1956).

La Sonate à Kreutzer (1956)

bourgeois apartment buildings

The New Wave's first memorable commentary on new architecture is Michel Poiccard's passing remark in A bout de souffle about an apartment block on the corner of the Rue de Vaugirard and the Rue Bonaparte: 'There's where I was born. Opposite they've put up a horrible building. Buildings like that depress me. The whole beauty of the area is ruined':

This judgment on Marcel Macary's 1954 block seems a bit harsh but we may sympathise with Poiccard's nostalgia for what it replaced on seeing what was there before (below right). The building he claims to have been born in (below left) dates from 1780:

Other new, high-class residential blocks in New Wave films receive closer attention but are spared critical comment. Within Paris there are three such buildings from the 1950s in Astruc's La Proie pour l'ombre (1961) - they are discussed at the end of my post relating to that film, here:

The central couple in Alain Cavalier's Le Combat dans l'île (1962) live in a modern building that I haven't yet located. Cavalier says that the apartment used for the film was that of Louis Malle, so perhaps I just need to find out Malle's address in 1962:

The protagonist of François Truffaut's La Peau douce (1964) visits an apartment building under construction, where he hopes to live with his mistress. The address is 1 rue du Conseiller Collignon, in Passy:

This is actually only six buildings down from where the protagonist lives with his wife, at 15 rue du Conseiller Collignon (built 1939, architect Gabriel Blanche). We see little of the exterior of number 15 but a great deal of the interior - the apartment shown was, according to Truffaut, his own.

The apartment building in Godard's Une femme mariée (1964) is surrounded by other buildings under construction:

This is the Elysée 2 estate at La Celle Saint Cloud, inaugurated in April 1962 by Jean Cocteau and Salvador Dali - the film shows the inaugurating signatures of each artist:

In 1960 Maurice Pialat's L'Amour existe had shown an artist's impression of Elysée 2, just before construction started:

social housing

Pialat includes this image of the soon-to-be built Elysées 2 development among images of existing estates that are somewhat lower down the social scale:

Some of these estates, and comparable others, appear in later New Wave-related documentaries, such as Chris Marker's Le Joli Mai (1963):

(For identifications of the estates in L'Amour existe see section 3 of my post here; for Le Joli Mai see here.)

Eric Rohmer's 1964 essay Métamorphoses du paysage ends with views of suburban social housing and hopeful comments about the future landscape of France:

Some of these estates appear in fictions.
The same year as Chris Marker filmed in Meudon-la-Forêt for Le Joli Mai (the two images right), Godard was there for Les Carabiniers:

In Bande à part (1964) a general view along the Marne shows the Château Gaillard estate ahead, glimpsed also as the protagonists drive through Maisons Alfort:

(The Château Gaillard estate appears in L'Amour existe, and featured heavily in the 1959 Gabin vehicle Archimède le clochard - see here.)

Other views in Bande à part show other housing blocks, further along towards Créteil:

And here are other brief views of housing blocks seen in the background as the protagonists of Bande à part drive past:

This kind of view is how social housing estates, HLMs, often appear in New Wave films, ignored by the characters as they drive past but sometimes observed more closely by the camera. Here, for example, in Le Feu follet (1963):

Or here, in La Vie à l'envers (1964):

A variant on this are the housing estates seen from trains heading into Paris in the opening credits of Paris nous appartient and Zazie dans le metro:

In both cases, the modern architecture seen from the train approaching Paris contrasts with the traditional aspect of the city on display in the rest of the film.

Two New Wave films develop an explicit contrast between living in old and traditional central Paris (the Latin Quarter in both cases) and living in the modern suburbs. The couple at the centre of Les Jeux de l'amour live at 51 rue de la Montagne Sainte Geneviève; the couple in La Belle Vie live on the rue de la Huchette:

In les Jeux de l'amour their friend is an estate agent, and a sequence shows him with a client visiting an apartment in a suburban housing estate. The sequence begins with a cameo from Claude Chabrol, living in a bidonville-type shack next to the estate:

At the end of La Belle Vie the couple move from the centre of Paris to an apartment in a large suburban housing estate. (An additional contrast is established with the banlieue pavillonnaire where the man's parents live.) To the house-warming party their friends bring as a present a blown-up photograph of the view from their former apartment on the rue de la Huchette:

Topographical contrasts in La Guerre est finie (1966), Alain Resnais's only Paris-set film of the New Wave period, are generally on a much larger scale (see here), but we can see a similar opposition at work between traditional old Paris - the Latin Quarter again - and various views of suburban housing estates:

Claude Lelouch's Une fille et des fusils (1965) is not otherwise interested in the Saint-Ouen housing estate near which the protagonists gather, but it does foreground its proximity to the line separating the city from the suburbs, thematising its liminality:

This is the Bad New Wave on territory already claimed for the Old Wave by Marcel Carné in Terrain vague (1960), a Saint-Ouen-set social melodrama about disaffected youth in a suburban wasteland:

The only New Wave fiction with a fully suburban setting is Agnès Varda's Le Bonheur (1965). The main location is Fontenay-aux-Roses, but there are several views of the Mont-Mesly estate in Créteil:

The New Wave film best known for its preoccupation with suburban social housing is Godard's 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d'elle (1967), with multiple views of the Cité des 4000 at La Courneuve:

This embedded proximity is contrasted with panoramic views of distant buildings:

The isolated building on the left had already appeared in an isolated upward tracking shot in Godard's Alphaville (1965):

This is a tower in the 17e arrondissement, next to the boulevards extérieurs, by Raymond Lopez and Eugène Baudouin:

The new architecture in Alphaville tends to be institutional, commercial or industrial, rather than residential, but there are glimpses in the dark of the Les Courtillières estate in Pantin as Lemmy Caution arrives by car from the outer galaxies:

Post New Wave, Godard films a group of conversationalists on waste ground near social housing at Les Mureaux, 78, for Un film comme les autres (1968):

university buildings

The spectacle of modern architecture is commented on by a character in La Proie pour l'ombre as he drives past what look to me like university buildings: 'It's fantastic, all these buildings, in glass, in steel. You'll see, in 2000 years people will come on pilgrimage to see them, like Notre Dame, or Versailles. It's beautiful, isn't it?':

I haven't yet managed to identify this location.

Eric Rohmer's two documents of student life, Nadja à Paris (1964) and Une étudiante d'aujourd'hui (1966), both show university-related buildings in and around Paris:

Students Brigitte et Brigitte (Luc Moullet 1966) visit the campus at Nanterre and give it 18/20:

La Chinoise (1967), Godard's film about students, also shows the campus at Nanterre:

In Resnais's La Guerre est finie (1966), the middle-aged protagonist meets his student-lover at this student centre in Paris:

This closer view of the building is from Marker's Le Joli Mai:

new architecture as spectacle

Most of the buildings already presented manifest a mere generic modernity; some are given visual distinction by how the films frame them. New Wave films occasionally display buildings that are already and inherently spectacular. First among these is the Centre National des Industries et des Techniques, aka le CNIT at La Défense, built 1958 (architects Robert Camelot, Jean de Mailly and Bernard Zehrfuss):

In Le Signe du Lion (Eric Rohmer 1959) the protagonist walks past this building on the way to Neuilly:

This is the only instance of architectural newness in this film, otherwise centred on the old Paris of the 5th and 6th arrondissements.

A year later the protagonists of Les Jeux de l'amour drive past the CNIT:

It can be seen at a distance in Chris Marker's Le Joli Mai (1963):

Brigitte and Brigitte (Brigitte et Brigitte, 1966) see it from a distance when they go looking for lodgings in a Nanterre bidonville:

In Alphaville Godard uses interior parts of the CNIT, but the one time he shows the exterior it is in negative and easy to miss:

The Esso building at La Défense (1962, architects Jacques and Pierre Gréber) is not in itself as spectacular as its neighbour the CNIT, but in Alphaville its façade repeatedly fills the screen to make these shots the most overwhelming of that film's inscriptions of architectural newness:

Another building of architectural distinction that, like the CNIT, is hard to recognise in Alphaville is the Maison de la Radio (1963, architect Henri Bernard):

We see it more clearly in Marker's Le Joli Mai (1963):

In 1966 it is visited by Brigitte and Brigitte:

Orly

P. George, P. Randet & J. Bastié, La Région parisienne (P.U.F., 1964), p.109

The New Wave's interest in the airport at Orly begins in 1959 with Le Signe du Lion and A bout de souffle:

There are brief sequences at Orly in Les Distractions (Jacques Dupont 1960), La Fille aux yeux d'or (Jean-Gabriel Albicocco 1961) and Le Combat dans l'île (Alain Cavalier 1962):

But the first New Wave film to be fixated on the architectural forms of the newly modernised airport was Chris Marker's La Jetée (1962), beginning and ending on the eponymous observation pier:

The international terminal at Orly Sud (architects Jean Prouvé and Henri Vicariot) was inaugurated by De Gaulle in September 1961, inaugurating a national enthusiasm for sight-seeing at the airport: 'Orly served as a revelation of modernity in France. This big modern building became a tourist attraction. On some days there were more visitors than travellers' (Paul Andreu & Marc Augé, ‘Aéroports: entre lieu et non-lieu’, Artpress 216 (1996)).

By opening and closing with scenes shot on the jetée at Orly, Jacques Baratier's 1963 parody Dragées au poivre associates the novelty of the airport with the newness of the New Wave:

Neither Marker's serious photo-essay nor Baratier's derisory comedy shows the terminal building's façade nor any of its interior attractions. In 1964 three different New Wave filmmakers present the new building in detail, outside and in. Truffaut's La Peau Douce drives to Orly three times via the Autoroute du Sud, which had been diverted in the late 1950s to service the airport, passing under the runways:

La Peau Douce offers various views of the exterior, most dramatic of which is this panorama taken from the new terminal building:

Views of the aeroplanes and runways include the point-of-view from the cockpit:

The interior is well-documented, despite Truffaut's cutting scenes he had shot in the Publicis cinema and the airport bookshop:

Godard's Une femme mariée references La Peau douce in several ways, in particular in its sequences shot on the way to and at Orly:

Chabrol's Le Tigre aime la chair fraiche is generically different but still consciously shares the world of La Peau douce and Une femme mariée:

The narrative climax of Resnais's La Guerre est finie is at Orly:

In 1967 Godard returned to Orly for his sketch 'Anticipation':

Appendix 1: Orly in non-New Wave cinema

Assignment in Paris (Robert Parrish 1952):

Razzia sur la chnouf (Henri Decoin 1955)

Bedevilled (Mitchell Leisen 1955)

Le Chanteur de Mexico (Richard Pottier 1956):

Funny Face (Stanley Donen 1957):

Un Martien à Paris (Pierre Daninos 1960):

Goodbye Again (Anatol Litvak 1961):

Le Cave se rebiffe (Gilles Grangier 1961):

Les Parisiennes (1962), sketch 'Françoise' (Claude Barma):

Les Petits Matins (Jacqueline Audry 1962):

Les Ennemis (Edouard Molinaro 1962):

In the French Style (Robert Parrish 1963):

L'Ainé des Ferchaux (Jean-Pierre Melville 1963):

L'Homme de Rio (Philippe de Broca 1964):

Boeing, Boeing (John Rich 1965):

Objectif 500 millions (Pierre Schoendoerffer 1966):

Chappaqua (Conrad Rooks 1966):

Made in Paris (Boris Sagal 1966):

Play time (Jacques Tati 1967):

La Chamade (Alain Cavalier 1968):

Topaz (Alfred Hitchcock 1969):

Petit à petit (Jean Rouch 1970):

Appendix 2: autoroutes

La Proie pour l'ombre (Alexandre Astruc 1961)

Made in USA (Jean-Luc Godard 1966)

Motorways in New Wave films are mostly a means to make speedy escape from the city. In the case of the deviation taken by the Autoroute du Sud towards Orly, this motif combines with aviation as evasion:

My initial plan was to locate the various views of the autoroutes de l'ouest, du nord and du sud and of the several routes nationales to be found in New Wave and para-New Wave films, but this has proved to be somewhat ambitious, so in this appendix the locations are mostly left unidentified:

Ascenseur pour l'échafaud (Louis Malle 1958)

Les Distractions (Jacques Dupont 1960)

La Fille aux yeux d'or (Jean-Gabriel Albicocco 1961)

La Proie pour l'ombre (Alexandre Astruc 1961)

Les Carabiniers (Jean-Luc Godard 1963)

La Nuit la plus longue (José Bénazéraf 1964)

Bande à part (Jean-Luc Godard 1964)

Alphaville (Jean-Luc Godard 1965)

Made in USA (Jean-Luc Godard 1966)

The one motorway built in this period (1958-1973) that doesn't facilitate escape from the city is the boulevard périphérique that encircles Paris. It doesn't feature much in this corpus, except for the views of its construction in Godard's 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d'elle (1967):

Appendix 3: building sites

Images of construction point to a newness to come, sometimes - as in La Proie pour l'ombre - in combination with images of demolition, pointing to something lost:

L'Amour existe (Maurice Pialat 1960)

La Proie pour l'ombre (Alexandre Astruc 1961)

Unsurprisingly, the film with the most images of construction is Godard's 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d'elle, which is as interested in the building of roads and bridges as it is in the building of buildings:

In smaller number, construction images occur in other films, including several by Godard and some by Rohmer:

La Boulangère de Monceau (Eric Rohmer 1962)

Les Métamorphoses du paysage (Eric Rohmer 1964)

'Place de l'Etoile' (Eric Rohmer 1965)

'Gare du Nord' (Jean Rouch 1965)

Masculin-Féminin (Jean-Luc Godard 1966)

La Chinoise (Jean-Luc Godard 1967)

Le Gai Savoir (Jean-Luc Godard 1968)

Appendix 4: bidonvilles

Post-war France's makeshift alternative to social housing is commented on directly in Pialat's L'Amour existe, Bernard-Aubert's Les Lâches vivent d'espoir and Marker's Le Joli Mai, and bidonvilles can also be seen in films by Godard and Moullet:

L'Amour existe (Maurice Pialat 1960)

Les Lâches vivent d'espoir (Claude Bernard-Aubert 1961)

Le Joli Mai (Chris Marker 1963)

Brigitte et Brigitte (Luc Moullet 1966)

Le Gai Savoir (Jean-Luc Godard 1968)

The habitat of the protagonists of Godard's Les Carabiniers is designed to evoke the bidonvilles of the Parisian periphery, but their home is isolated from others in wasteland, so in no sense a ville:

Les Carabiniers (Jean-Luc Godard 1963)

The fullest cinematic representation of the bidonville in this period is the non-New Wave Octobre à Paris (1962), chiefly filmed at Nanterre: