Steven Ungar
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Steven Ungar “TOUTE LA MISÈRE DU MONDE”: ELI LOTAR’S AUBERVILLIERS AND A SENSE OF PLACE Paris, the center; the banlieues, the circumference; to these children, this is the whole world. They never venture beyond it. They can no more live out of the atmosphere of Paris than fsh can live out of water. For them, nothing exists beyond the city gates. Ivry, Gentilly, Arcueil, Belleville, Aubervilliers, Ménilmontant, Choisy-le-Roi, Billancourt, Meudon, Issy, Vanves, Sèvres, Puteaux, Neuilly, Gennevilliers, Colombes, Romainville, Chatou, Asnières, Bougival, Nanterre, Enghien, Noisy-le-Sec, Nogent, Gournay, Drancy, Gonesse; these are the end of the world. —Victor Hugo, Les Misérables (1862) lace-names (toponyms) align experience with the measurement of physical Pspace associated with location (geography) and maps (cartography). The fact that all of the place-names listed above can still be found on maps of greater Paris enhances their evocative force a century and a half after Victor Hugo wrote Les Misérables. Belleville thus conjures up generations of emigrants newly arrived from Europe, Asia, and Africa; Ivry, a psychiatric clinic where the poet, actor, and theater director Antonin Artaud spent the last two years of his life; and Ménilmontant, Dinitri Kirsanoff’s 1926 silent flm starring Nadia Sibirskaia. Like the flm critic André Bazin some twenty-fve years earlier, the writer Didier Daeninckx spent time as a young adult in the 1970s screening flms in schools and youth centers on the northern outskirts of Paris. Recalling the stint, Daeninckx has stated that he often introduced feature-length flms by Fritz Lang, Joseph Losey, and Jean Renoir by screening Eli Lotar’s Aubervilliers, a 1946 documentary he considered a tribute to the town—among those listed by Victor Hugo in Les Misérables—where he had attended primary and secondary schools.1 1. Didier Daeninckx, “Aubervilliers,” Jeune, dure et pure!: une histoire du cinéma d’avant-garde et expérimental en France, ed. Nicole Brenez and Christian Lebrat (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma/Mazzotta, 2001) 164. In 1996, Daeninckx wrote that one reason he started out writing romans noirs was the proximity of the La Villette slaughterhouse The Romanic Review Volume 105 Numbers 1–2 © The Trustees of Columbia University 38 Steven Ungar Because Lotar’s flm depicted the gritty atmosphere that Daeninckx would later evoke in his own fction, he wondered why it was not better known among those who lived there. The historian Tyler Stovall begins his study of Bobigny, immediately to the east of Aubervilliers, by noting that turn-of-the-century perceptions of areas in and around the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth arrondissements among inner-city Parisians ranged from a terra incognita to the citadel of “an organized and vengeful proletariat, the barbarians waiting outside the gates of the city.”2 What Stovall calls the red belt of working-class neighborhoods in north and northeast Paris includes a number of locales in which Daeninckx sets his fction. It also overlaps with sections of la Zone, a thirty-fve-kilometer-long ring of shanty towns that sprang up in the mid-1850s between military fortifcations built a decade earlier and the ring of outlying towns (communes) and villages (faubourgs) Victor Hugo had described in Les Misérables as the end of the world. Stephen Barber reinforces this sense of the area as foreign and threatening when he characterizes Aubervilliers in the 1990s as a vast non-city of non-citizens beyond Paris.3 This article situates Eli Lotar’s photography and flmmaking within avant- garde visual cultures in France between 1928 and 1946. To this end, I take a frst cue from efforts by narrators of Daeninckx’s crime novels (néo-polars) to disclose the causal trajectory of what appears at frst to be a minor incident or crime. A second cue builds on Michel de Certeau’s assertion that every story is a travel story and thus a spatial practice.4 What, then, does Lotar’s cinematic complex, which, in his mind, was equaled only by the Chicago stockyards Upton Sinclair had described in his 1906 novel, The Jungle. See also Daeninckx, “L’Écriture des abattoirs” and “À Aubervilliers, comme ailleurs . .,” both in La Mémoire longue: textes et images, 1986–2008 (Paris: Cherche-Midi, 2008). 2. Tyler Stovall, The Rise of the Paris Red Belt (Berkeley: U of California P, 1990) 1–2. 3. Stephen Barber, “European Breakdown Zone: Paris Suburbia,” Extreme Europe (London: Reaktion, 2001) 89. 4. Michel de Certeau, “Spatial Stories,” in The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. S. Rendall (Berkeley: U of California P, 1984) 115. Polar, which translates as “detective novel” or “crime novel,” is a shortened form of roman policier (police novel), which is sometimes condensed as rompol. Its origins in France go back at least as far as Charles Baudelaire’s translation of Edgar Allan Poe’s 1841 short story, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” For Jean-Patrick Manchette (1942–95), the néo-polar and roman noir (literally, “black novel”) contributed to a self-styled literature of crisis among young leftists and anarchists whose writings directed conventions of crime fction toward social critique in the aftermath of May 1968. See “Interview, Polar (1980)” in Jean-Patrick Manchette, Chroniques (Paris: Rivages/Noir, 2003) 12, and Jean-Patrick Manchette, Romans noirs (Paris: Quarto, 2005) and Journal (Paris: Gallimard, 2008). Alternate takes linking the roman noir to the literary and cinematic antecedents of postwar flm noir include Charles O’Brien, “Film Noir in France before the Liberation,” Eli Lotar’s AUBERVILLIERS and a Sense of Place 39 treatment of place in his 1946 flm disclose about the town of Aubervilliers? And how might a clearer understanding of Aubervilliers provide insight into practices of social cinema in France dating back to the late silent era? Documentaries by Georges Lacombe, Boris Kaufman, André Sauvage, and Marcel Carné completed between 1928 and 1930 broke with newsreel, travelogue, and scientifc-educational modes of nonfction flm. They did this by means of visual treatments of Paris and Parisians that departed from picture-postcard accounts of the city in dozens of fction and nonfction flms produced during the same period. Much like American crime thrillers of the early to mid-1940s that critics later dubbed flms noirs, it was only in retrospect that the documentaries were seen as heralding practices of social cinema whose emergence in France was marked by flmmaker Jean Vigo’s 1930 call for flms whose treatment of provocative subjects would move spectators in ways that “only cinema could move them.”5 Vigo made only four flms before he died in 1934 at the age of twenty-nine. His frst, À propos de Nice, culminated a frst wave of silent-era documentaries that depicted what an inter-title in Lacombe’s La Zone (1928) had described as a curious population of all races living together on the outskirts of Paris. (The comparison holds despite the fact that Vigo and cameraman/codirector Boris Kaufman shot their flm on location some 700 kilometers southeast of Paris.) Vigo wrote “Toward a Social Cinema” (“Vers un cinéma social”) to introduce a screening of À propos de Nice at the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier in Paris. Whether by design or not, it echoed a 1914 article in which his father, the journalist Miguel Almereyda Vigo, had described movie theaters as sites of awareness rather than distraction: “Imagine what such movie theaters could transmit to spectators and what transformations they could bring to their attitudes (mentalitiés) [. .] It is up to us to take [cinema] and use it in the service of progress, justice, and beauty.”6 For Vigo père and fls alike, flm was a means of educating and mobilizing spectators toward activism. Eliazar Lotar Teodoresco (1905–69) was born in Paris, the son of Tudor Arghezi, a Romanian poet, and Constanța Zissu, a teacher. His participation in the literary and visual avant-gardes of Paris began soon after he returned Iris 21 (1996) 7–20, and James Naremore, More than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts, Rev. ed. (Berkeley: U of California P, 2008). 5. Jean Vigo, “Vers un cinéma social,” Jean Vigo, Oeuvre de cinéma, ed. Pierre Lherminier (Paris: Cerf, 1985) 65–68. In English, see “Toward a Social Cinema,” French Film Theory and Criticism, 1907–1939: A History/Anthology, ed. Richard Abel, vol. 2 (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1988) 60–63. 6. Miguel Almereyda, “La Semaine cinématographique: considérations sur le cinéma,” Le Bonnet Rouge (5 Apr. 1914); Nicole Brenez, Cinémas d’avant-garde (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 2006) 68. 40 Steven Ungar to Paris in 1926 when he began an apprenticeship under the German-born photographer Germaine Krull. Lotar’s photos soon appeared in art journals and in galleries alongside those of Krull, Man Ray, André Kertész, Jacques- André Boiffard, and Berenice Abbott. Twelve of his photos were included in the landmark 1929 Film und Foto exhibition in Stuttgart. Lotar’s early street photographs display motifs of the urban marvelous evoked in illustrated prose narratives by surrealists André Breton, Louis Aragon, and Robert Desnos.7 In Somewhere in Paris (Figure 1, 1929, English in the original title), the whiteness of laundry hanging on a makeshift clothesline pops out against the dark tone of a decrepit stone wall and the wooden shutters behind it. The shadow of a chair atop a pole forms an acute angle on a dirt surface. The image of the chair seemingly impaled by the rod adds a jolt of violence to the mundane setting. The effect redirects what is otherwise expository reportage toward Lotar’s predilection for unattractive subjects (sujets ingrats) and arresting details. Lotar’s 1933 photo, La Zone, Billancourt (Figure 2), features parallel diagonals formed by rooftops, posts, the right shoulder and back of a man pushing a wheelbarrow, and bicycle wheels.