Paris in the summertime

Perhaps, like me, you've visited Paris in all the wrong seasons. True, there is never a wrong season to visit any great city, but then there are certainly the right seasons to visit: the periods when all the people in the know suddenly descend like a flock of birds, peck at the seeds for a few days, before dispersing again (odd image that I plucked from my head... but the right people tend to have the right look, hence they tend I'm sure to peck at bird seeds whilst in Paris).

August is certainly one of those wrong seasons. Stylish Parisians and their friends are all sunning themselves in the south. Some (many?) of the more elegant spots not feeling the need to cater to hungry tourists board up for the month. But the one thing that keeps going, as I was reminded in this article by Tony Scott in the NY Times, are the little pocket cinemas where on any given day you have any kind of retrospective you might want: from silent Westerns of the 1920s to a 16 hour Rocky marathon.

"Love, sophistication, eroticism, danger, class struggle, violence, tenderness, political intrigue — any effect, theme or motif you can contemplate is likely to have a Paris address. You can recognize these local habitations even if you have never visited the city. When you do visit, you often have the uncanny feeling of walking through a movie..."



"The actual Louvre, imposing as it may be, comes alive when encountered in the sprint through its galleries undertaken by Arthur, Franz and Odile in Jean-Luc Godard’s “Band of Outsiders.”"

And every walk by every riverside in Paris is filled with cinematic possibilities...

If you'll pardon a bit of overreaching here. there was a book (Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human) by the critic Harold Bloom which argued that Shakespeare not only reflects that gamut of human emotions, but creates them. In the same way, Scott seems to argue, the cinema makes Paris Paris, and the Paris we see through our eyes is through the filmmakers lens.

xo

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