Beneath the Paving Stones the Cinémathèque: Tout va Bien a Paris!

By Gabriel Riocabo

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Illustration by Alyssa Xu
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Has Paris forgotten the cinémathèque? The ephemerality of film was enough to spur Henri Langlois in 1936 to make a conscientious effort to try to preserve it. The place was Paris—the city Walter Benjamin called the "the capital of the 19th century." A place thus steeped in history, Paris is both the birthplace of film and the logical site of its preservation. But how are we to remember the transitory? What does it mean to preserve film; is it to simply safeguard celluloid or is it to project its benefits and relevance into the present? When Benjamin speaks of Jeitzeit —historical now-time—he is speaking of film. Film memorializes what it records, but it doesn't solidify history—it opens it. It projects light; a beacon of possibilities. The film is a historical document, but it is one that always retains its immanence, its presentness. It is because of this that Jeitzeit is the project of the cinemathèque. In Paris—that imaginary Paris, that is always saddled by the burden of History it invented. The cinémathèque tries to remember that ingenious antidote, that machine for forgetting, the cinema.

Transient Buildings, Permanent Films

The new cinémathèque has been 15 years in coming and seven months in transit. Having closed its doors in up-market Trocadero, it has reopened in an incongruously low-key neighborhood on Paris' east side. But the move comes with Frank Gehry-designed digs included. The building was intended to house the American Center, but it has wound up being Gehry à la Francaise. In order to screen films it has been retrofitted just six years after its completion by the French architect Dominique Brard. Nonetheless, the website proudly announces that this is the only Frank Gehry in the hexagon, a typical way of describing France's borders. The promotional material takes pride in the building's structural qualities—indeed it promotes them to the exclusion of all else. Deleuze once remarked that only the architectonically-obsessed French could have invented structuralism. Gehry's building reacts to this preoccupation by taking materials associated with incredibly solid structures and injecting them with movement and fragmentation. Stone, concrete, steel, oregon pine and atrium windows are all put at the service of a disjointed façade that is meant to evoke a tou-tou. It is an attempt to reinvent imposing structure while simultaneously evoking a warmth and intimacy that its materials would seem to preclude.

Begun in 1988, the building is a ghostly monument to America's cold-war mission of cultural hegemony—a projection in concrete of American solidity and style. The irony of the fact that it now serves as a shell for a totemic expression of Frenchness has thus far gone unnoticed. With the cold war won, the Center was a hieroglyphic, testament to the folly of big-cost 'starchitecture' and to its intrinsic lack of purpose. To be housed in a Gehry though seems appropriate for the cinémathèque. France is the land of the auteur in no small part thanks to the new-wave directors and critics, from Bazin to Varda, who were nourished from Langlois' celluloid teat. Architecture makes many of the same claims regarding authorship as film did in the cinemathèque's heyday.

Architecture and film are the most stubbornly collective arts but the cinemathèque has always insisted on the primacy of the author. Its very reverence for paternity, for its Langlois, is an affirmation of the afficionado, an advertisement for the benefits of apprenticing oneself to the whims of a particular and masterful collector. It was always more wunderkammer than kunsthalle. We are always in Langlois' private film cabinet. This is problematic when one considers the space confectioned by Gehry. Not only is the building a hybrid of two architects, but its insistence on movement suggests an ironic inversion; a fluid architecture to hold permanent films. Material elements representative of the past are retained in the present, but their retention is put at the service of a future perfect. Its obsession with both natural light and monumentality point to an irresoluble conflict. An architecture, borne one might say, from the inherently split utopic projects of cinema—from its desire to bathe the whole world in light and its incomparable utility for preserving and recording chosen elements of the past.

Surprisingly the cinemathèque restores a semblance of continuity by returning to the 12th arrondissment, the home of its original screening room. Fitting, only if one forgets the years of failed schemes that shunted it all across the capital, a victim, like so much in France, of the highly bureaucratic and often imperious central government. The cinémathèque has been the enfant terrible of a government often consumed by the issue of cultural patrimony. Jean Cocteau remarked that the cinemathèque was a cultural and juridical monster "the dragon which stands guard over the treasures of cinema". It was, after all, the attempt to wrest control of the cinemathèque from Langlois by then Minister of Culture André Malraux that set in motion the spring of 1968. So when Jacques Chirac and Martin Scorcese hobnobbed at the recent reopening it was seen by the French press as an effort to efface a tumultous past beneath the weight of a sumptuous new castle.

Paris Is A B-Movie

DANGER: DIABOLIK, A CULT B-FILM FROM 1968, WAS THE FIRST FILM SCREENED IN THE NEW 'JEWEL-BOX' SCREENING ROOMS. THE IRONIC POIGNANCY WAS LOST ON NO ONE. A TESTIMONIAL TO THE KIND OF HIGHLY PERSONAL VISION APPRECIATED ONLY BY THE INITIATED, THE TYPE OF CINÉPHILE THE CINEMATHÈQUE SUPPOSEDLY ENGENDERS AND CATERS TO, AND A RELIC OF A PARTICULAR AND LOADED HISTORICAL MOMENT. THE CHOICE CONCISELY ENCAPSULATES THE INSTITUTION'S PREDICAMENT. THE CINÉMATHÈQUE WANTS TO BE RELEVANT AGAIN. IT WANTS TO BE A PART OF THE CULTURAL TABLEAU, BUT THE BOARD HAS CHANGED. AMERICAN CULTURAL HEGEMONY, THE INTERNET AND OTHER BANALITIES HAVE INTERCEDED. IT IS ANCHORED NOT SO MUCH IN THE PAST, BUT IN A WAY OF VIEWING THE PAST IN THE PRESENT, IN A FAITH IN HISTORY THAT SEEMS OUT OF STEP AND QUAINT. THE CINÉMATHÈQUE IS A LODESTAR FOR WHAT WE CONCEIVE OF AS FRENCH. THAT BLUSTER AND CYNICISM, BITTER IRONY AND HOPELESS ROMANTICISM THAT SHOUTS ITS SUPERIORITY TO THE HIGH-HEAVENS WHILE FRETTING ABOUT WHETHER ANYONE STILL CARES IN A CONSTANT MUTTER. THE CINÉMATHÈQUE IS JUST MORE GRIST FOR THE STANDARD BOILERPLATE OF THE COUNTRY'S CHATTERING CLASSES, BUT WHILST THEY INTERROGATE IS PARIS BURNING THE BANLIEUS ARE ABLAZE.

The bustle of the Parisian street on which the new-wave descended has been substituted by unrecordable historical noise. Like the American Center it replaces, the cinémathèque embarks on a project when its very purpose can no longer be conceived of as a historical imperative. Godard's generation, "raised on Marxism and Coca-Cola," is gone. The French no longer learn their English from b-films, but from international commerce which knows no past or future. It is from here, that architecture and film now take their cues. They know only the law of proliferation. The constantly new: the Gehry 'masterpiece' refitted just six years later. But this very newness consigns it to the scrap heap of the monument. The cinémathèque's stated goal of fulfilling an educational function: a tragic testimony that it has nothing to say about the future. Gehry compared the building to a ballerina lifting her skirt, inviting people to come in, but what the cinémathèque needed more than a new building was an age where that might still be titillating.

GABRIEL RIOCABO B'06.5 broke his nose throwing Jacques Chirac under the train tracks.

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