THE SCENES PROJECT

In collaboration with New Cross & Deptford Free Film Festival and Deptford Cinema, the Scenes project was developed to explore psychological and emotional responses of audiences to film.

Participants were invited to talk about a moment in film, from the iconic to the obscure – a memorable image, a haunting performance, or simply a cinematic scene that they admired. After the festival, I continued to collect film scenes in conversation with volunteers at Deptford Cinema. Being so small and intimate, the cinema was conducive to these kinds of conversations.

It was my aim to give people an unhurried space to think and talk about a film and its associations. Some were spontaneous recordings with people who knew exactly what scene they wanted to talk about. Others needed more time to narrow down their selection from the hundreds of scenes filed away in their visual memory and we would meet to record their chosen scene later in a Deptford café. These one-to-one recorded conversations brought out a different retelling of a scene, perhaps more quietly reflective than the usual post-film discussion. Some participants shared a personal view of an iconic scene, while others chose scenes that were little-known gems. The individual and subjective meanings derived by participants from these scenes were often surprising, always unique.

Recordings of the conversations were transcribed, edited, and later presented as a limited-edition publication. A small selection of films discussed in the Scenes project were also screened at the cinema in 2019. I will be showcasing some of the scenes in a series of Journal posts.

LES ENFANTS DU PARADIS

Dir. Marcel Carné

1945

The following scene from Les Enfants du Paradis was recorded in conversation with Simon F, a visitor to Deptford Cinema during the festival in 2018.

What comes to me is a French film by the director Marcel Carné, Les Enfants du Paradis, which means literally ‘children of the gallery’, paradis being the French word for the gallery seats in the theatre, therefore the cheapest seats.

The film is black and white and shot during the war when the Germans were occupying France. Carné filmed it in Paris, so in amongst the crowd scenes, there are members of the French resistance hiding there; he got them jobs and hid them away. When I watched that film, it just swept me up into another world, the world of a theatre, with a tragic love story at the heart of it between Baptiste and Garance.

It captures Paris, the kind of Paris you might have read about in the 19th century with beggars and thieves and theatre impresarios. I had always been interested in theatre and acting, but this was the one that captured my imagination and made me feel that it was possible to create and to live in a world like that, if only for a brief period of time. I saw it again when I was a bit older at the Renoir cinema, now the Curzon Brunswick, and it made an even bigger impact on me, because I’d only seen it on the small screen up until then. It was just extraordinary to feel this 35mm black and white thing coming at you and it was a really powerful experience. It lives with you, lives in you. I guess that’s what you want from a good film.

I sort of related very much to the rather grandiose actor at the centre of it. There’s a wonderful scene when he’s waiting for the curtain to go up and he’s got tuberculosis and he’s coughing and as the curtain goes up, he pulls himself up to full height to conceal his inner torment from the audience. There is something so touching about that, and I imagine that people who have to perform in the public eye, whether it be a doctor or some other official person, they have to put their own personal condition to one side sometimes to do the job. I always find this an interesting part of human experience.

So, he’s an actor in the 1940s, playing an actor in the 19th century in a certain theatre world that doesn’t exist anymore. That’s what you feel (I certainly feel it) when you get to middle age sometimes – you are in the world but not of it; you love it, but something about it leaves you quite nonplussed, unsure what to make of it. Change and progress are not necessarily the same thing, but there’s always change. But progress is an idea in someone’s mind. Who says what progress is?

So that’s the scene. It’s just a very brief moment, but it just seemed to encapsulate a lot for me – a fortitude in the face of a certain kind of adversity.

There’s a mime at the heart of this, by Jean-Louis Barrault; he plays the character Baptiste and he’s one of these Pierrot figures and of course, he doesn’t have much to say, but manages to express his tenderness for this woman, his unrequited love in a rather beautiful way. It’s theatrical in a way that shouldn’t work on film, but it does because it’s done with such tenderness and feeling. What you want is a sense of their inner life, in any art form, and it doesn’t matter when it was made if it was made with heart and you can still feel that. That’s what I respond to. And Les Enfants du Paradis seemed to me made like that.

I just remember all the street scenes. I suppose the nearest thing to that is Dickensian London really, and you really get the sense of the hustle and bustle and life of the city at that time. It focuses mainly on the people, hence the title, The Children of the Gallery, the poorer parts of society. It’s a great hymn of love to the theatre and the human spirit, and what was in hearts and minds during that time of the war.

It was made in 1944 while the Germans were still in Paris. Daily executions and round ups, but they got it together somehow. When you watch it you think, ‘How did this happen?’ In Italy, they had a similar experience with occupation and out of that poverty came a new Italian cinema. De Sica and Fellini literally made films out of nothing, on the old film stock that was borrowed from military film labs. If you are forced to improvise, compelled to use things around you, something comes out of it that has a heart and that you can’t really replicate. It’s a very strange thing to be an artist; you are always surrounded by lack of means, financially and materially, and of course, we would all like a bit more, but what happens when you have state subsidised art, it’s all a bit bland for me. A huge generalisation! A balance is needed, I guess. Too much poverty is demeaning to the human spirit. But too much excess just creates conformity.

Simon F.

SCENES: Les Enfants du Paradis