Paris Journal VI: Raiders of the Lost Generation

Paris was once populated by a Lost Generation of expatriate Americans known for their talent, wit and sometimes genius. Woody Allen humorously addressed this era of the 20’s in Midnight in Paris. Today that Lost Generation has multiplied and their great great great grandchildren—in other words, Americans, are everywhere. Having propagated almost biblically, the descendants of the Lost Generation have become like a plague of locusts. You can’t go anywhere in Paris without seeing Americans and just when you think you’ve located a bona fide Frenchman, who talks the talk and walks the walk, even he or she can turn out to be an American dressed up as Frenchmen. You learn not be fooled by Francophiles in berets, who can rattle off esoteric Metro stops like Michel-Ange- Molitor and have no trouble cherching for the rue du Cherche-Midi. Though the onslaught of Americans is welcomed for the economic bounty they represent, they’re looked at suspiciously and even disdainfully by many Parisians precisely because even those with affectations fundamentally lack the Gallic charm, the holy grail that many Americans come to Paris for in the first place. When a Frenchman comes to New York, he or she is generally treated like royally due to the way they embody what is deemed to be a superior culture. But the achievements of the Lost Generation of Hemingways and Fitzageralds have long been forgotten and it’s the image of the ugly American with his or her profound lack of savoir faire—the tourist loaded down with guide books, time sensitive tickets to the latest blockbuster art show at the Grand Palais and naturally their Zagat’s--that’s prevailed. In a sense it’s unfair. Why should enthusiastic Americans be penalized while the French are rewarded for being what they are?

Paris Journal VIII: Felix Vallotton

Photograph of Vallotton’s "Etude de fesses" by Hallie Cohen

If you’ve never heard of Felix Vallotton, think Manet and Ingres, Edvard Munch, Strindberg (who he recalls in a succession of woodcuts devoted to scenes of domestic strife “Les Intimites"), Zola (who he painted) and Vuillard and Bonnard who constituted the group, Les Nabis, of which he was a member. The current show Felix Vallotton: The Fire Under the Ice at the Grand Palais is not chronologically but thematically organized and the early portraits grouped together under the title “Idealism and Purity of Line” pay homage to Ingres. But his“Femme au Perroquet,” an odalisque displayed in the section devoted to  “Flattened Perspective, “ recalls Manet’s “Olympia,” with its flat painterly surface. The subtitle of the show “the fire under the ice” refers to the cool surfaces with which Vallotton approached his erotic subject matter. For instance, the curators point out that he used the line like an invisible corset to control the emotions unleashed in erotic paintings like those grouped together under the title, “Femmes Duets.” Commenting on this duality in his own work, Vallotton is quoted as saying: “I think I paint for people who are level-headed but who have an unspoken vice deep inside them. I actually like this state which I share.” The current exhibit ingeniously places Vallotton’s “Etude de fesses” (“School of Buttocks,"1884), a female behind, next to a ham, as if to underscore the artist’s point. Can we say about Vallotton, whose career embodies a plethora of modernist strategies that eschew one distinct style, that the hole was greater than the sum of the parts?

Paris Journal VII: Jean Cocteau at the Cinematheque Francaise

Photograph: Hallie Cohen

The Cinematheque Francaise was the brain child of Henri Langlois. Along with Andre Bazin’s Cahiers du Cinema, it became the home for New Wave directors like Truffaut, Rivette, Resnais Godard, and Chabrol.  Now housed in a Frank Gehry designed structure, the Cinematheque has come a long way from its humble beginnings and is now as auspicious a part of the French cultural landscape as say the Louvre, the Grand Palais or the Paris Opera. It’s hard to believe that the Cinematheque and the directors who supported it were once the new boys on the block, many of whose early efforts were a rebellion against the techniques and methods by which many French films had previously been made. One could look at Les Quatre cent coups as both a film about adolescence as well as a metaphor for rocky development of an art form. One thing that can also be said about the Cinematheque is that it’s a hundred and eighty degree turn from the quadriplexes in which films are now shown around the world. Even American art houses like Film Forum serve popcorn, but while you can eat in the Cinematheque’s café, there are no concession stands. The Cinematheque is like the Vatican for film buffs and you don’t eat popcorn when visiting  the Holy See. October ll was the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Jean Cocteau the poet, playwright and director and along with an exhibition devoted to his life, the Cinematheque has been showing classics like Le sang d’un poete and La belle et la bete. A newly restored version of the surrealist classic with its statues come to life  recently enchanted a Sunday afternoon audience of children and adults. In the hands of Cocteau the classic fairytale is turned into one of the great essays on sexual initiation and its accompanying landscape of murderous and libidinous wishes. As the current exhibition demonstrates, Cocteau had an enormous impact on both past and present. He and Andre Bazin wrote one of the first books in French on Orson Welles and his poetic vision of cinema was enormously influential on many French directors. Could there have been L’Annee derniere a Marienbad without the surrealist innovations of a film like Beauty and the Beast?