Paris nous appartient : Reading Without a Map

Abstract

This essay, based on extensive research into the exact locations shown in Paris nous appartient (1961), asks if having a precisely plotted map of the film would be useful to readers embarking on an interpretative analysis thereof. I give at least one answer, in conclusion, on the evidence of the one place that is not accurately “plotted” by Rivette. Prior to that conclusion, the essay considers “reading”, “mapping” and “viewing” as complementary ways of approaching the film. My point of departure is a challenge to the pertinence of Rivette’s title as clarion-call for the French New Wave. When, in Les quatre cents coups (1959), the Doinels go to the cinema, the film they see, impossibly, is Paris nous appartient. Impossibly, because Rivette’s film would not be released for at least two years, and anyway it would never be playing at the Gaumont Palace (their local cinema). By means of this characteristic in-joke,1 Truffaut claimed authority over the truth of his representations, and announced that Paris would very soon belong to the French New Wave. Les quatre cents coups is one of several New Wave films circa 1959 in which such a claim might have been made, which could indeed have had the phrase as title. Hanoun’s Une histoire simple (1958), Rohmer’s Le Signe du Lion (1959) and Godard’s A bout de souffle (1960) might have had to be called “Paris m’appartient”, but the plural form fits well, for example, Chabrol’s Les Cousins (1959), Les Bonnes Femmes (1960) and Les Godelureaux (1961), Mocky’s Les Dragueurs (1959) and Un couple (1960), Godard’s Une femme est une femme (1960) and Rouch’s Chronique d’un ete (1961). In each case, however, including Rivette’s, the claim would be loaded with irony. In watching Truffaut’s film, audiences would see that the Paris there laid claim to was an unfamiliar city. If in the 1950s you were mostly watching American movies, Paris was more or less the Eiffel Tower, the Champs Elysees and Montmartre, and it belonged mostly to Hollywood stars on their holidays.2 If it