Paris Plays Itself: Widescreen and the City

Abstract

ABSTRACTDrawing on the video work of Thom Andersen and the film criticism of Manny Farber, this article argues that negative space in widescreen cinema constitutes a kind of optical unconscious whose urban content can be reactivated through a critical re-viewing of films that privileges location over narrative content. In a discussion of three French widescreen films of 1967, Jacques Tati’s Playtime, Jean-Luc Godard’s Two or Three Things I Know About Her and Jean-Pierre Melville’s The Samurai, it further suggests that genre films with no avowed urbanistic content may provide insights into the city unavailable from a more explicitly sociological cinema.