I don’t think, it’s the ultimate wisdom…
Chris Marker died last year and in tribute to the French film maker the Sheffield Documentary festival opened with a showing of Le Joli Mai. This is a 1962 documentary about Paris which Marker directed in collaboration with Pierre Lhomme. Another documentary, Chronique d’un été, had been made by Morin and Jouch in 1960 and Marker had been impressed with the ability of the new handheld 16mm Eclair cameras. These allowed film-makers to get out into the city with minimum kit and Marker used the same equipment to make his own state of the nation film, purporting to examine the psyche of the French capital in 1962. Owing to the recent cessation of the Algerian war this was the first summer of peace for the French nation for decades.
‘Is this the most beautiful city in the world?’ the narrator, Yves Montand, asks as the film opens with some long, beautifully composed shots of Paris. Marker’s answer is clear and he spends a few minutes serving up some delightfully framed abstracted images of Paris, his bridges over the Seine looking particularly stunning. Natural noises fill the soundtrack, the filmmakers clearly delighting in the new lightweight equipment that allowed them to record out on the streets.
The film consists mainly of unedited interviews with what appear to be the man on the Bastille omnibus. However, the subjects are suspiciously talkative. The first star is a salesman of men’s suits. He is filmed from the right, speaking to – and looking at – an interviewer off screen, the frame only showing suits, an advert for suits and our talkative salesman. This fellow is soon telling the interviewer that his wife only loves him for what he can earn. He adds that all that counts is cash and he is, if we are to believe him, only happy when he has sold a suit. Marker must have interviewed hundreds of people in order to find these voluble subjects, or he has been a victim of people seeing a camera and spotting a chance to pontificate.
There are faces everywhere. The interviews are mainly shot in close-up, with the camera moving haphazardly to show details like a spider walking across a man’s jacket. Nowadays we are used to the handheld shot, but Marker was experimenting with something new. The subjects are asked what they think about; what makes them happy. One woman with nine children tells of her new apartment and Marker is given access to film from the balcony of this new abode. We see a cabbie who paints modern art, a woman who plants her garden with plastic flowers. These are not everyday Parisians. Marker has deliberately sought out ‘stories’, making sure that the people he films are entertaining and unusual. Whether this approach delivers a reasonable portrait of Paris is debatable.
Although billed as an examination of Paris in May after the independence of Algeria this is only obliquely mentioned. What it appears to mean to one interviewee is the madness of the stock-market. He had expected Algerian independence to force it down 7%, instead it had gone up 10%. But this is only the view of one man, as is the opinion that ‘the atomic bomb is bringing this cold weather.’ Marker comes close to holding people up for ridicule, as when he tells the suit salesman to go and watch L’Année dernière à Marienbad, or cuts to cats whilst interviewees are speaking. People say things that are silly, sensible, outlandish, boring, interesting and too much information. And they say these things at great length. A modern documentary maker would rarely allow such rambling. The questions are unfocused. One woman is asked ‘Can you be happy under a dictator?’ The answers veer towards the preposterous, someone musing that ‘…from a human point of view all regimes are equal.’
This version of the film is too long at 145 minutes long, though it is split into two halves, with a song by Yves Montand dividing the two. It has recently been screened at Cannes and has an extra 40 minutes of footage that had previously been cut. The restored footage mainly refers to Algeria and reintroduces political overtones that the film originally had. That may be a good thing, but it has made a baggy, unfocused film that rides on the goodwill many cineastes have for Chris Marker.
The ending of the film lists a lot of statistics about Paris in May, as though Marker is trying to finally focus the film on Paris. There was 43mm of rain in the month, 37 million litres of milk were drunk. If we are to see all that has gone before as similarly representative of Paris, a few of the interviews do show a broad view of Parisian society, as with an Algerian boy who has suffered racism. However most of the interviews are too precise to have universal application and the opinions of the few cannot be extrapolated to represent the views of the whole city.
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