Cinephile 2013
I had opportunities to travel quite a bit between the ages of 19 and 22, but despite spending more than a year in Europe during that period, I didn’t spend any time in Paris. I kept telling myself I’d go there once I spoke French. After a few decades, it became clear that I would never speak French, and I kind of wanted to see the place.
Wanda and I planned to spend a May in Paris, and since films made in the city formed such an important part of my love for cinema, I decided to bring along some motion picture film to shoot. I hadn’t made a film on film since autoerotica in 2000, and I felt that this perhaps might be a way to say adieu to the medium in the city where the first public film exhibition occurred. I packed a Bolex camera and 10 x 100′ rolls of Kodak 7222.
I decided to get to know the city by looking for the locations of some films shot there. I traced the locations of films like The 400 Blows, Breathless, Last Tango In Paris, Zazie dans le Métro, Charade,and Amélie and wandered through the Montmartre and Montparnasse cemeteries where some film legends rest. I visited many of the Latin Quarter’s repertory cinemas, and La Filmothèque du Quartier Latin let me into their projection booth to change a roll of film.
I shot at some of the locations that Celine and Jesse visit in Richard Linklater’s Before Sunset. In that film, Julie Delpy’s character Celine mumbles something about the part of the city she lives in, but Wanda and I weren’t able to make it out. Then one day while walking along a street, we saw a doorway that looked familiar. We passed through it, stepped into a courtyard and realised it’s where Celine lived. As Wanda walked up the staircase that Celine and Jesse went up near the end of the film, the film roll ran out and the tail of the film got a bit fogged while unloading.
When I returned to Canada and had the developed film transferred to HD, I chose the 16:9 aspect ratio, which baffles me now. I should have stuck with the 4:3 of the original.
I used audio excerpts from some of the films whose locations I traced, which has caused issues when I put the film on YouTube. I believe the French word for this is hommage.
