Screening the Paris suburbs

From the silent era to the 1990s

Philippe Met

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781526107794
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architektur
• Subtopic: Stadtplanung & Landschaftsgestaltung

Decades before the emergence of a French self-styled 'hood' film around 1995, French filmmakers looked beyond the gates of the capital for inspiration and content. In the Paris suburbs they found an inexhaustible reservoir of forms, landscapes and social types in which to anchor their fictions, from bourgeois villas and bucolic riverside cafés to post-war housing estates and postmodern new towns. For the first time in English, contributors to this volume address key aspects of this long film history, marked by such towering figures as Jean Renoir, Jacques Tati and Jean-Luc Godard. Idyllic or menacing, expansive or claustrophobic, the suburb served divergent aesthetic and ideological programmes across the better part of a century. Themes central to French cultural modernity – class conflict, leisure, boredom and anti-authoritarianism – cut across the fifteen chapters.

1
On the origins of the banlieue film, 1930–80

Annie Fourcaut

Growth of the contemporary suburb around the French capital came on the heels of the annexation in 1860 of outlying villages and the region's subsequent industrialisation (Bourillon and Fourcaut 2012). Though other French cities displayed similar patterns of development, at the close of the nineteenth century the couple formed by Paris and its banlieue was unique in fashioning spatial perceptions on a national level. Henceforth, the banlieue was conceived exclusively in relation to Paris, which would remain the centre of political, economic and cultural power until the era of State decentralisation. The modernising efforts undertaken by the Baron Haussmann, who served as Prefect of Paris during the Second Empire (1852–70), as well as the enactment of turn-of-the-century hygienist legislation, drove factories, cemeteries, slaughterhouses and mental institutions out of the capital one by one. The effect across the better part of a century, from 1880 to 1960, was that the city lost its proletarian character. Low-cost housing came to typify the suburb, where many migrants from France's regions and from abroad first landed before taking up semi-permanent residence. A popular, working-class belt characterised by heavy industry, hovels and rooming houses and housing estates built after World War II on a mass scale came to surround – if not to overshadow – the City of Light.

A marked spatial rupture explains why the city and its outskirts were perceived in oppositional terms. Both a town and a French département, Paris assumed after 1860 distinct administrative status from its neighbouring municipalities¹ from which it was physically separated by its fortifications and their outlying military zone non aedificandi. Military declassification and demolition of the ring of fortifications took place between the wars, although the last inhabitants of the Zone, known as ‘zoniers’, were expelled only under the Vichy government, in 1943. On the former site of the fortifications and the Zone sprung up blocks of low-cost social housing (Habitations à Bon Marché, or HBM), civic amenities and infrastructure. After 1960, large-scale, modern subsidised housing estates known as HLM (Habitations à Loyer Modéré) were built on declassified land outlying the Paris ring road whose construction spanned the years 1957 to 1973. Thanks to the périphérique – now Europe's most heavily trafficked motorway – the city's threshold remained highly visible through the twentieth century. Physical proximity of Paris and its neighbouring municipalities did little to diminish the insurmountable symbolic distance that separated them.

Cinema and suburb both appeared in France at the close of nineteenth century; as such, they should be treated as contemporaneous historical phenomena. The seventh art was uniquely positioned to forge representational codes for a space that as yet lacked a history. Over time, by highlighting successive spatiotemporal frames of reference, fiction films and documentaries constituted an imaginary of the urban periphery. The various layers of that peripheral imaginary include locales as diverse as the verdant banks of the slow-moving Marne River; the imposing fortifications and impoverished Zone just outside the capital; the popular, working-class districts with their factories that found unity under the Popular Front of 1936; the new towns which signalled the sudden arrival of modernity; and the crisis-ridden world of the contemporary cités. This dense layering could scarcely be transposed to another site; arguably, no other national cinema has represented the suburb with such consistency and tenacity as that of France.

To be sure, suburb films have played a role in other national contexts. Tokyo Kids (Yasujiro Ozu, 1932) portrays two youths who take on a gang in a city suburb where traditional Japanese houses stand amid vacant lots. But Ozu's film is an exception; Dodesukaden (Akira Kurosawa, 1970), which sites its action on a rubbish heap, is perhaps better described as a shantytown film. Pier Paolo Pasolini's work for the screen underscores two facets of Rome's industrialising periphery: Accattone (1961) portrays the suburban underclass in the borgate, while in Mamma Roma (1962), the former prostitute played by Anna Magnani hopes to save her son Ettore by moving to a new housing block in the Don Bosco neighbourhood, newly annexed to the capital. In the United States, where immigrants gravitated toward city centres, the equivalents of suburb films are pictures about the lower depths such as Man's Castle (Frank Borzage, 1933), distributed in France under the revealing title Ceux de la zone (‘Those from the Zone’). France's response to the likes of Angels with a Dirty Face (Michael Curtiz, 1938), which explores the attempts of a parish priest to save local children from a life of crime in New York's lower depths, is arguably the missionary suburb film exemplified by Notre-Dame de la Mouise (Robert Péguy, 1941). Likewise, work by contemporary Franco-Maghrebi filmmakers owes not a little to ghetto or ‘‘hood films’ shot since the 1980s by African-American directors from the viewpoint of oppressed populations whose communities are beset with violence from within and without. The new British social cinema has likewise described urban misery in peripheral neighbourhoods devastated by unemployment, whether around Manchester as in Raining Stones (Ken Loach, 1993) or Sheffield as portrayed in the wildly popular The Full Monty (Peter Cattaneo, 1997).

Proletarian children of misery: the Zone

Outlying Paris's fortifications was a zone non aedificandi 250 metres wide littered with lightweight constructions and inhabited by workers and ragpickers. Beginning in the 1920s, this belt of shantytowns encircling the capital was slowly razed, its last vestiges disappearing only in the 1970s upon completion of the ring road. Hemming in Paris, the ‘fortifs’ and the Zone enjoyed considerable literary fortune as a setting in works by the likes of Emile Zola, Joris-Karl Huysmans and the Goncourt brothers. ‘The zone sets the stage for an exotic travel literature devoted to a suburban jungle in which native savages speak street slang (la langue verte)’ (Cohen and Lortie 1991: 67). Gangs of young delinquents known as ‘Apaches’ who refused factory work despite their working-class origins terrorised bourgeois Parisians in exploits popularised by the press and in pulp fiction. Silent-era film directors found in the Zone and the ‘fortifs’ an ideal setting for burlesque chase scenes between thugs and policemen as well as for adaptations of nineteenth-century novels that included Eugène Sue's Les Mystères de Paris (1842–43) and Adolphe d’Ennery and Eugène Cormon's Les Deux Orphelines (1877). In the pre-war Gaumont feature L’Enfant de Paris (Léonce Perret, 1913), the act of crossing the fortifications has a key plot function.

After World War I, images of a ‘black belt’ of filth and misery surrounding Paris surface in representations of the periphery in La Zone: Au pays des chiffonniers (Georges Lacombe, 1928). A former assistant of director René Clair, Lacombe shot this documentary – a documentaire romancé in the parlance of the period – in the Zone itself. Caravans, wood-plank cabins, sickly trees and stray animals form a fantastic backdrop for a screenplay that follows a ragpicker family through the workday and into evening. Children in tatters (Figure 1), gypsies, junkmen and fallen music-hall star La Goulue are each portrayed. Hailed by the critics of its time, La Zone became a classic of whistleblowing cinema. Writing for La Revue du cinéma in December 1928, Pierre Audard called it ‘a documentary where anecdote has no role to play, where events viewed with simplicity and quotidian cruelty take on an unsparing necessity to weave the chain of a whole life; where the screen itself is a glass eye’ (Association Paris expérimental 1985: n.p.). One astonishing sequence expresses the inhabitants’ desire to flee to a bucolic elsewhere: two lovers – a gypsy woman and a young man – embrace tenderly on the grassy fortifications holding a newspaper entitled La Vie à la campagne.² The camera pans as the newspaper flies skyward and images of flowering apple trees against wide-open sky fill the screen. This dream of amorous escape prefigures Casque d’Or (Jacques Becker, 1952), where the trysts between Marie (Simone Signoret) and Manda (Serge Reggiani) unfold alongside the leafy Marne River, far from the city, which catches up with them all the same, in the person of Félix Leca (Claude Dauphin) (Burch and Sellier 2014: 288–9).

The sordid power of the Zone fuels a series of fiction films released at the onset of World War II, among them Les Musiciens du Ciel (Georges Lacombe, 1939) which was shot at the Saint-Ouen flea market. Focused on the plight of endangered shantytown children, L’Enfer des anges (Christian-Jacque, 1939) was banned by French censors for its portrayal of the Zone's hovels, only to be authorised for release by the German occupation authority in 1940 for the same reasons.³ Set designer Roland Quignon, who was behind the archetypal 1930s faubourg film La Rue sans nom (Pierre Chenal, 1934), rebuilt the Zone in the studio for Notre-Dame de la Mouise (Robert Péguy, 1941). In all these cases, setting allowed spectators to engage in an archaic reading of societal problems: the Zone's shacks are the hovels decried in the nineteenth century by philanthropists and public health advocates on account of the alarming rates of alcoholism, tuberculosis and prostitution observed there. The fictional characters uphold age-old perceptions of the periphery as a space for the fallen and downtrodden: burglars, elderly plagued with consumption, old hags and streetwalkers, pimps and madams are the rule, and the few characters who have managed to stay pure the exception. Amid such misery, salvation can come only from outside. The poor's fate always depends on this external logic, even if the spread of virtue requires the cooperation of a native figure as mediator. Thus in Notre-Dame de la Mouise Michèle Morgan, playing a young Salvationist who has come to help the zoniers, dies from tuberculosis, but not before saving the little thug Victor who in turn dedicates himself to saving souls. The priest character similarly wins over and converts Bibi-le-mal-loti (roughly, ‘Bibi the slumdweller’), a formerly dangerous revolutionary who responds to his calls by joining the priesthood.

Following the Allied Liberation, Aubervilliers (Eli Lotar, 1946) signals a return to the documentary form. Its director Lotar, screenwriter Jacques Prévert and composer Joseph Kosma leave their avant-garde artistic stamp on classic images of suburban misery. Prévert's lyrics recall the spoken manner of the October Group with whom he worked in the 1930s; Kosma punctuates his score after the manner of Kurt Weil; while Lotar, who had shot Luis Buñuel's Las Hurdes: tierra sin pan (Land Without Bread, 1933), borrows deliberately from social filmmakers’ repertoire: the face of a sleeping baby covered with flies and a smiling girl, her clothing in tatters, recall in equal measure Eisenstein, Borzage and Henri Storck and Joris Ivens’ Misère au Borinage (1933).

An activist work by all accounts, Lotar's post-war documentary is furthermore a political curiosity. Commissioned by the newly elected mayor of the northeast inner suburb of Aubervilliers, Charles Tillon,⁴ and shot with equipment supplied by the Ministry of Air which Tillon himself headed, it denounces capitalism by showing, among other images, the burnt hands and spent lungs of a factory worker. But the quasi-entirety of Prévert's voice-over heaps blame on ‘former mayor Pierre Laval’ for the sorry state of the Landy neighbourhood, which had been slated for demolition and renovation. At the time, Laval, who had been sentenced to death for collaboration with the Germans and shot in October 1945, was doubtless the most hated man in all of France – a fact that renders problematic Lotar's emphasis on his ineptitude in governing the town of Aubervilliers.

Modelled after the Zone film, Aubervilliers shows caravans and picket fences, fleabag hotels and cabins, and the encampment of a large family surrounded by what appears to be the rubble of the demolished fortifications. What the film does not say, save at the very end when voiceover commentary invites workers to pull up their s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 On the origins of the banlieue film, 1930–80
• 2 Lumière, Méliès, Pathé and Gaumont: French filmmaking in the suburbs, 1896–1920
• 3 Roads, rivers, canals: spaces of freedom from Epstein to Vigo
• 4 The banlieue in French cinema of the 1930s
• 5 Julien Duvivier and inter-war ‘banlieutopia’
• 6 Margins and thresholds of French cinema: Ménilmontant, Le Sang des bêtes, Colloque de chiens
• 7 Georges Franju and the grotesque genius of the banlieue
• 8 Tati, suburbia and modernity
• 9 A crucible of emotions: Maurice Pialat’s L’Amour existe
• 10 Godard’s suburban years
• 11 The banlieue wore black: post-war French polar, from Becker to Corneau
• 12 Erasing the suburbs: the grands ensembles in documentary film and television, 1950–80
• 13 Elusive happiness: screening France’s new towns after 1968
• 14 Towers of evil: Jean-Claude Brisseau
• 15 What’s left of the ‘red suburb’? Hervé Le Roux’s Reprise as case study
• Index
• Plates