Dead cinemas, living spaces: The Victor Hugo Pathé

Way back in 2008, when this blog was a mere tot, I tried to launch a miniature visual database of disused and transformed cinemas in Paris. One that I missed back then though is perhaps one of the most interesting of all – the Victor Hugo Pathé – which was a special location for several reasons.

The Theatre de Belleville

The evolution of a city is a gently flowing stream, turning over old stones and rolling them down to new positions. As fashions change and tastes diversify, buildings are transformed or pulled down and newer models spring up in their place. The city always wants to display its most modern face, but often clues are left behind which betray the past. Such is the case with the Theatre de Belleville.

Little pictorial evidence exists of the original theatre built in 1826 on the Cour Lesage off the Rue de Belleville, but by all accounts it was a magnificent building both inside and out. This was a time when Belleville was one of the suburbs of Paris, a place of leisure where Parisians went to enjoy cheaper entertainment and more relaxed licensing laws, and the theatre became one of the most important in the region.

It was particularly popular amongst the working classes, and the theatre repertoire reflected their tastes. Vaudeville, historical plays and melodramas were the most successful, keeping audience numbers high for many years. So popular was the theatre in fact that when it was badly damaged by fire in 1867, the necessary money for repairs was very quickly found.

The theatre continued to thrive into the twentieth century until a new competitor came along that would prove more dangerous than fire - the cinema. The theatre stuggled to adapt and keep up with fashions, until in 1932, Paul Caillet, the owner at the time, decided to demolish the old theatre and put up a new building in its place. Using the most modern art-deco styles of contemporary architects, no longer could it be said that the Theatre de Belleville was behind the times.

The new building incorporated not only a theatre, but also apartments, a dance hall and a garage. However, the new venture wasn't the success that Caillet had hoped for. The theatre was certainly one of the most modern around, but it lacked the charm that its regulars had always appreciated. Soon it found itself sharing the auditorium with film screenings, and by the end of the 1940s, cinema pushed drama out of the building forever.

However, even as a cinema it was not a great success. There was too much competition in the neighbourhood (there were upwards of 30 cinemas in Belleville and Menilmontant in the 1950s), and the theatre de Belleville was too large. The end came in 1962 when it was sold off and transformed into a supermarket. It hadn't finsihed its evolution yet though, and today the supermarket itself has become a chinese restaurant.

So what is left today of the theatre? The attractive art-deco building still stands with its impressive central column. The two lowest levels still show the form of a cinema frontage, even if they have been decorated in a more chinese style today. What is left is one final clue. Although the theatre became a cinema, a supermarket and a restaurant, the pharmacie at the beginning of the street saw no reason to change. And that meant that there was no reason to change its name either.

Paris Polaroids: An Afternoon Spent in 1968

For the first in a new series of Paris Polaroids guest posts, Tim Pike remembers his brush with the 1960s and his unique perspective on a Paris film set.

In 2002 I was mid-way through a two-year tenure at an organisation based on Avenue de Messine, just a stone’s – or, as we will soon find out, a cobblestone’s – throw from Parc Monceau in the 8th arrondissement.

Avenue de Messine has all the hallmarks of Haussmann’s Paris: it is a wide, tree-lined boulevard flanked by elegant but somewhat identikit buildings that mix and match residential dwellings with office space. It also happens to lack the hustle, bustle and vibrancy of the city’s more high-profile arteries. Automobile traffic there is always sparse, giving drivers the extra impetus to put their foot down and make the occasional pedestrian crossings potentially lethal for anyone who has the misfortune to be on foot. And it was Avenue de Messine that was momentarily closed to all-comers to form the backdrop to the May 1968 riot scenes in Bernardo Bertolucci’s movie The Dreamers, which were filmed there on a quiet August day and August night in, yes, 2002.

Granted, there’s nothing particularly novel about being in Paris and spotting a film being made. However, enjoying an office-window view of the clock being turned back 34 years in the space of an afternoon was a fascinating experience. The lone cars to have ignored the A4 warnings displayed on lampposts were towed away. Benches were uprooted and replaced with older models, as were the ornate metal grids that sit around the base of tree-trunks across the city. Parking meters were hidden. A 2002-vintage bank was boarded up and airbrushed out of reality. Then a procession of vintage Citroëns, Renaults and Peugeots arrived, driven by their proud owners. And finally, the pièce de résistance: thousands of possibly hand-crafted polystyrene cobblestones were tipped out onto the street by a delivery van, ready to be hurled at the police/authorities by the student demonstrators.

Meanwhile the main cast-members were hard at work in a nearby building filming some interior scenes, and outside a small army of extras reported to a desk which had been set up on the pavement. They were allocated their 1968 clothing, had their 21st-century hairstyles coiffed out of them and went to sit, smoke and drink coffee on makeshift seating a little further down the avenue, biding time until they were to be called on to riot against the Establishment.

Observing the people, artefacts and surroundings as they were sucked into the past, the colour scheme changed from bright, vibrant shades to a palette of browns, off-whites, greys and blacks. Suddenly the summer sun didn’t seem to be shining quite as brightly. But strangely, in much the same way as a black and white photograph puts greater emphasis on shadow and light, giving whole new dimensions to the subject matter, Avenue de Messine also instantly gained in character and personality; for once, there was a bit of life about the street.

My working day drew to a close as the cameras and crew relocated outside for the night-time riot scenes. I reluctantly left the office and my second-floor vantage point, whilst reminding myself that one thing the film didn’t need was a character wearing 2002 dress staring down from an office window. Walking past the piles of cobblestones, I pedantically wondered whether their airborne trajectory would be anything like that of their rock-solid counterparts, but reckoned researchers in white coats had probably already looked into the issue and that it was probably long-solved.

Returning to work the next day, just about every trace of it having been 1968 for a few hours had been scraped, moved or driven away. 2002 was back out in force and Avenue de Messine once again became its succession of interchangeable buildings and drivers in a hurry. I made a mental note to go and see the film when it came out but never did, so sadly I have never witnessed the end-product. Writing about it now though, I’m beginning to wish I had, if only to see how convincing those polystyrene cobblestones actually looked on the silver screen.

Tim Pike
Outside of his day job, Tim is also a talented musician and songwriter. He can be found at http://www.myspace.com/drbrochet and will also be playing a concert at the La Tactique bar on rue Pascal, in the 5th arrondissement of Paris on Friday September the 18th.

Send Your Paris Polaroid! The beauty of the Polaroid was that it captured an instant. Such pictures were celebrations of the emotion of a moment, but like memories, Polaroids faded over time. In this series I am aiming to compile a selection of these Paris instants for posterity. If you have a memory of a Paris instant you would like to share, please send it to me and I will publish it here. A photo (which I will transform into Polaroid form) would be a bonus but is not a necessity (I can find one!). If you have a site, a project or a business to promote, send me the link and I will add a mention to your post!

City of Lights, Camera, Action

I'm always interested to hear how other people see Paris, so I was very happy to be contacted recently by the publishers of a new book on the city. For some people Paris is defined by its architecture whilst for others it is written out in the pages of a book, but for writer Michael Schurmann, the city is one large film set. So great is his passion that he has dedicated much of his recent life to the creation of a series of 'movie walks' which take the visitor through circuits of some of the key film locations in the city. Interested by his passion and his unusual perspective of the city, I was fortunate this week to chat with him and get a personal tour of his Montmartre neighbourhood.

Originally from Germany, Schurmann spent several years working in London, notably with the BBC World Service before a company takeover eventually brought him to Paris. He worked for several years at Eurosport as a commentator, mostly for American sports, but today divides his time between writing and freelance translation. Always a film buff, his passion grew as he got to know the city better, and today he lives on the almost permanant film set which the Montmartre hill has become. As soon as we leave his front door he is immediately able to point out the locations of two films and the previous apartment of one of France's top directors.

The staircase leading down to the Au Soleil de la Butte café, both featured in the 1995 remake of Sabrina.

Our walk takes us through some of the more well known sites such as those used in Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain, but there are many surprises en route as well. Schurmann is meticulous in his research, sometimes spending hours in front of his television, pausing films at key moments and studying a scene in minute detail. He then walks around the approximate area of the shoot until he finds the eureka moment of the exact location and the precise camera angle. In this way he believes that he has made discoveries that are not documented elsewhere, notably with the film An American in Paris (the scene location is pictured at the top of this post). As he writes in the book,

"All the books on the subject say that the entire movie was shot on a Hollywood sound stage, where the original settings were more or less faithfully re-created, but if you compare the view you're seeing (here at the top of the staircase) with the film's final tableau, the similarities seem too striking to believe that we're merely seeing a recreation in the film"

A key location in 1998's Ronin.

As we walk we chat, and I point out to Schurmann that creating a successful walk is a little like producing a successful film; it needs to have a good beginning and end, and not to lose people in the bits between. He agrees, but points out that by following a movie walk in Paris people are unlikely to ever get bored or find their attention drifting. For American audiences, Paris is always used for a reason, and when Paris is chosen as a location it becomes one of the biggest stars in the film. To use it against type and send audiences to some non-descript corner of the 15th arrondissement for example would be like using Brad Pitt in a film and only giving him a walk on part. Why go through the trouble and expense of using this star if you don't then give audiences what they want? For this reason, almost all the locations described in the book are picturesque and often feature key touristic sites.

A case of life imitating art. The epicier featured in Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain was rendered 'more authentic' for the film, but the store owner has kept it in exactly the same condition since.

I ask Schurmann if there is there any film though that has taken the risk to use the city against type, and he thinks hard. The answer he gives is also his favourite film set in the city; The Bourne Identity. He calls it 'an andidote to the saccharine that's an occupational hazard for people who watch too many movies about Paris'. This is not Roger Moore fighting Grace Jones on the Eiffel Tower, but Matt Damon hiding out in a no star hotel in a forgotten corner of Belleville. All of the locations used are logical and realistic and as Schuermann says, 'give you a real feel for the city'. It is featured in no less than seven of the ten walks in the book.

Schurmann is not a frustrated director or screenwriter, but just somebody with a genuine passion for film. I'm even surprised to learn that he would not particularly be interested in working as a location hunter. 'Can you imagine how difficult that job would be in reality?' he asks. 'Sure Paris is a dream city for making films, but how do you find locations that haven't already been used twenty times before? You need to incorporate recognisable sites, yet find angles that are completely new'.

Perhaps Paris will one day become the faded star, the actress who appeared in too many films and who began to bore the audience. Schurmann thinks this unlikely given the fact that the city authorities are so helpful to film makers and because the city itself is just so adaptable. As we walk along the top of Rue Lepic, my guide explains that this street was used at the beginning of La Vie en Rose (Piaf). 'It's so easy to make this street represent any era' he explains. 'For this film they just had to put up a few old posters, put the extras in costume and find a horse, and it is immediately the beginning of the 20th century'. However, he does have many examples of films that were supposedly set in Paris but in reality were filmed in other, cheaper cities, with Budapest being a particularly popular alternative.

We finish the walk and I thank Schurmann for showing me sites I wasn't familar with. I am not especially passionate about the cinema myself, but I find the book nevertheless to be an informative and entertaining read. Featuring over 120 films, it gives regular historical and cultural asides, and is much like going on a walk with the man himself. The tone is light-hearted and amusing, and the book always gives readers opportunities to dip in and out and organise the walks in their own manner. Finally, as Schurmann points out, 'even if you don't like the cinema and don't know the movies, you're still going to see some great parts of the city!'

Paris Movie Walks by Michael Schurrman is available from Amazon in the US, and will be published in the UK in August.