Paris and the Artisans, three films selected by Le Studio
Selected by Alexandre Tsékénis
1.Les petits métiers de Paris by Pierre Chenal
Pierre Chenal / France / 1932 / French / B&W / 16mm / 19min
In the prewar Paris, the streets were still crowded with itinerant tradesmen who seemed to come from another time. These barbers, quilters or unauthorized hawkers who inspired the writers or photographers so often didn’t have any qualification or the possibility to set up shops. Pierre Chenal lets himself seduced by their strange silhouettes, the equipments on their backs or on their carts, and their cries to attract the passers-by. His film tells a rare and precious story of such people who were not to be easily filmed. The filmmaker even had to stalk them, since they were suspicious of everyone, especially of the police!
Pierre Chenal (1904 – 1990) was an important filmmaker in the 1930s and 1940s, whose principal works included melodramas and detective films. In this documentary, one of the earlier works in his long career, the filmmaker does not hesitate to insert some short “staged” sequences to showcase his visual style. His sense of framing and composition adds beauty and poetry to this film, which is enhanced by the nostalgia of a world – already then – on their way to extinction.
2.C’est le chapeau qui fait l’homme by Bernard Lascazes
Bernard Lascazes / France / 1996 / French / Colour / Beta / 26min
23 year-old Jérôme is determined to be hatter. It is at Master Gencel, hat maker from father to son who create the « costume hats » in the traditional way for the show business, that the young apprentice embarks upon three-years intense training. In the workshop located at the heart of the Grands Boulevards, it is the duty of “the master of art” – title conferred by the Minister of Culture – to pass on his expertise that was becoming the exception at the end of the 20th century. Among the collections of military caps and pirates’ three-cornered hats, we can see Jérôme drawing a pattern, pulling the felt and sewing the cardboard, but also learning how to reconcile tradition and creativity.
In truth, the hat does make the man. Confident in his future, the young man sets about learning the trade of his passion.
This film was made as part of L’art et la manière (The Art and Skill) series, where each film is dedicated to a certain trade.
3.Daguerréotypes by Agnès Varda
Agnès Varda / France / 1975 / French / Colour/ 35mm / 80min
The title pays homage to the inventor of the first photographic portraits in 1839, as well as to a street in Paris that carries his name. This street, “rue Daguerre”, is Agnès Varda’s home, where she lives and works.
Therefore, it is as a neighbor and filmmaker that she visits the baker, the watchmaker or the hairdresser, filming these people at work behind their shop windows and in their cozy back rooms. Unchanged for years, their family-owned artisan business seems to be indifferent to the trends, and unfamiliar to the modernity that was transforming Paris at that time.
Born in 1928, Agnès Varda started her career as photographer. Like Jacques Demy, her lifetime partner to whom she dedicated several films, she is part of the Nouvelle Vague that revolutionized the French cinema at the end of the 1950s. In 1955, she directed her first film, La pointe courte, and since then alternates between fictions and documentaries that she often likes to mix in her own unique and poetic manner. Daguerréotype is an album of the neighborhood, comprising commonplace and touching personal histories, but it is also a reflection on the everyday life and the passage of time, dashed hopes and forgotten dreams.