So I was doing a word search for “Pynchon+female+flaneurs” y’know, the
way you do, and it turned up a movie review on letterboxd.com, by Chuck Williamson
discussing Pont de Nord, a 1982 movie
directed by Jacques Rivette, which I’d never heard of. I think it has the least relevant DVD cover I've ever encountered.
Rivette used to be one of my main men: Celine and Julie Go Boating was the movie that drew me in. I never saw
the whole twelve hours of his movie Out 1,
but I did make it through the 4 hours of the shorter cut Out 1: Specter. If I’ve
cooled slightly on Rivette it may be partly that so few of his films get wide
distribution, also frankly there always seemed a bit too much acting going on in his movies; not
helped by the fact quite a few of the movies were about people in theater groups.
Anyway, the Williamson review started like this: “Cervantes by way of Thomas Pynchon, Le
Pont du Nord is an improvised game of female flâneurs, urban modernity,
panoptic surveillance, and apophenia run amok. It recasts Paris as a
labyrinthine game board, a liminal space in the throes of renewal whose razed
and roughhewn layout houses an intricately patterned maze.”
Intrigued?
Well I was. I found a few stills
online – two women posing around in Paris, one of them instantly recognizable
as Bulle Ogier (a Rivette favorite), the other unknown to me: in fact it was
Bulle’s daughter Pascale, though they don’t play mother and daughter in the
movie.
A root around on Amazon suggested Pont de Nord was available on DVD in the
UK but not in the US, and although I really wanted to see the movie, I thought
it was just going to be one those intense passing urges that the internet
fosters then erases. But I thought I’d
check on YouTube, maybe find a trailer or some such, and there was the whole thing. There are, of course, all sorts of reasons to
fret about the royalty-free zone that is YouTube, but I am a weak man – I
watched it.
It is amazing and wonderful stuff, full of
game playing and psychogeography, and really 90 percent of the film has the two
female leads Marie (played by Bulle) and Baptiste (played by Pascale) wandering
around Paris, usually together; and if you say that the flaneur has to be a
solitary figure, well I’d say you’re being a bit harsh.
With
the occasional exception, the Paris seen in the movie is disorientatingly
unfamiliar. The women walk the
underpopulated the edgelands of the city, walking through wastelands, past
ruins, past things being demolished, along railway lines, up staircases that
seem to lead nowhere in particular. These
two singular (and I think you’d have to say rather actressy) women look around
them, look for clues, and why deny it, they also look very good.
There is a sort of thriller plot: you can
get away with a lot if you include a thriller plot. Pierre Clementi is wonderfully, reliably,
creepy as the bad criminal boyfriend, and there’s a lot of stuff with a map, actually
two maps, of Paris, showing the city as a (thoroughly incomprehensible) game,
with different squares representing tomb, prison, pit, auberge, and so on. This
inevitably doesn’t add up to as much you’d like, but somehow you never expect
it to.
I couldn’t help thinking I’d have been pretty happy if most of the plot and dialogue had been ditched and I could have
watched the two women walking around this unfamiliar, transitional Paris, and
I’m sure there must be some avant- garde filmmaker out there who’s made a movie
much like that.
But what you do get in Pont de Nord is a sense of
danger, the sense that these two women wandering the city are very vulnerable,
that no good is likely to come of it, and certainly that the men in the film
are unlikely to be any help. And in the
end, things do turn out very badly, though not in the way you’re
expecting. No spoilers from me.
There’s a good deal of discussion in
academic circles about the extent to which female flaneurism even exists. I only follow some of it. There is an argument, much of it having to do
with masculine sexuality and gaze, and the different ways in which men and
women relate to the city, which suggests flaneurism in the Beaudelairean sense
is a specifically male response to certain crises in 19th century
capitalism. There is also, naturally, a
desire for women to reclaim the territory.
There’s
an interesting 2002 essay by Helen Scalway titled “The Contemporary Flaneuse:
Exploring strategies for the drifter in a feminine mode.” It discusses the difficulties, and
“negotiations” demanded of a solitary woman walking in London. She describes an area close to where I used
to live: she describes the horrors of the Westway very accurately.
She also writes of the area in general, “Aggressively fast boy cyclists on the pavements. - and all the stopped people: unemployed youths, claiming space by their demeanor - probably because they have no space anywhere, really; all the homeless, the beggars, the drugged, drunk, deranged, predatory; other victims of care in the community.”
She also writes of the area in general, “Aggressively fast boy cyclists on the pavements. - and all the stopped people: unemployed youths, claiming space by their demeanor - probably because they have no space anywhere, really; all the homeless, the beggars, the drugged, drunk, deranged, predatory; other victims of care in the community.”
These things have to be negotiated my
male walkers as well, but in a different way no doubt. Scalway also takes an interesting dig at Iain
Sinclair, quoting the opening lines of Lights
Out for the Territory, familiar enough to many readers “The notion was to cut a crude V into the
sprawl of the city, to vandalise dormant energies by an act of ambulant sign
making.”
Yes, there is something
unnecessarily “manly” and macho about that wording, isn’t there? In part I suspect it’s because Sinclair
doesn’t want to come across as some, effete middle-class boulevardier, he wants to show how serious he is, a man on a
mission, with a special literary project.
In person he doesn’t come over as macho at all. But sure, I can’t imagine any woman ever
putting it quite that way, and Scalway certainly doesn’t.
Scalway continues, “I think about the manner of my walking. So then how
actually, do I walk? It’s a looking for spaces to slip
through and round, weaving and threading a path through which opens and closes,
darting, dodging and
dancing, two-stepping, giving way, persistently returning.
“My passage is not,
cannot be, like that of Iain Sinclair’s narrator who freely uses words such as march, stride, slog, swinging out into the main drag, yomp.
The words that come to my mind to
describe my movement through the street imply that it's a much more difficult
negotiation.”
I
like that, I like that a lot.
Helen Scalway’s website is here:
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