European cinema of the 1960s was festooned with anthologies or portmanteau films in which a grab bag of filmmakers contribute segments, sometimes on a theme and sometimes at random. As you might expect, many of these are highly mixed boxes of chocolate. One exception is Six in Paris (Paris vu par, 1965), judiciously produced by budding filmmaker Barbet Schroeder as a showcase for the French New Wave. Icarus Films has just issued it on Blu-ray.
Schroeder, associated with the French auteurist magazine Cahiers du Cinéma, produced Six in Paris on a shoestring by inviting friends he’d met at the magazine to come up with ideas. Each filmmaker picked a Paris neighborhood and constructed a little story, always with a handheld camera in 16mm color film. As Barbet said in a Swiss television interview, which is included as a bonus with this Blu-ray from Icarus Films, Six in Paris is “a film among friends.”
The result is more visually and tonally of a piece than such portmanteaus have a right to be. Without being specific, we can say that two of the segments include sudden deaths, and a third seems to. All are about the ironies of modern city life, whether that life seems comic or tragic or a mixture. All are about lonely people who try to connect or the dangers and dissatisfactions of connection.
Six in Paris opens with Jean Douchet’s segment on “Saint Germain des Prés”. While seeming fresh and of the moment, it also harks without fuss or pretension to classic French bedroom farces of mistaken identity. Like the other segments, it has a documentary quality as the camera wanders the streets, and a narrator informs us that an American art student (Barbara Wilkin) has impulsively gone to bed with a young Frenchman (Jean-Pierre Andréani) she met in a cafe. She admires the view from his fancy pad.
The next morning, he tries to eject her before going to the airport, and she gets upset that he’s a playboy. If this hardly seems fair, it confirms stereotypes about American girls and French boys. Then she’s bothered in the street by what the French call a dragueur (Jean-François Chappey), a persistent fellow trying to pick her up while she ignores him. Her discovery of the true lay of the land gives the story its twist. One sight gag is when she spots her playboy working as a nude model in art class, and suddenly, he’s as demure before her as a virgin.
“Gare du Nord” is an ambitious segment by an older master admired by the New Wave. Jean Rouch, a documentarian and ethnologist, told the Swiss interviewer that he wanted to make a film in a single shot ever since seeing Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope (1948). That’s what “Gare du Nord” seems to do until the punchline of a dramatic second shot.
As in the first segment, a couple bicker in their apartment in the morning, but their fight is more serious. Odile (Nadine Ballot) is fed up with her job, her placid, weight-gaining husband Jean-Pierre (Schroeder), and the noise and dust of construction nearby. She imagines her future getting worse, her life frittered away. She wishes she could go to the airport and hop on a random plane. She imagines airport announcements as a kind of modern siren song.
The camera follows the couple through all the rooms and stays with Odile as she descends in the elevator. The darkness between floors possibly conceals an edit in the epic shot before the camera follows her into the street, where she encounters what seems to be another dragueur (Gilles Quéant). He seems almost a magical figure who echoes some of her remarks to her husband. He might be a knight here to rescue her, though he frames it as if she is rescuing him. The situation has acquired a surreal tinge underlined by his final decision. Perhaps one lesson to be drawn is that she doesn’t wish to escape her struggling bourgeois life as she’d claimed.
Jean-Daniel Pollet’s “Rue Saint-Denis” is the only segment that never films outside. It’s a chamber piece in which a brash, bored prostitute (Micheline Dax) visits the room of a shy client (Claude Melki). This time, the blackout between segments is literal as the lights go out.
If Eric Rohmer’s “Place de l’Etoile” doesn’t quite feel like one of his characteristic stories, it’s because his protagonist is so isolated that he never makes a real connection with anyone. His encounters with others are awkward, and one of them throws him into a fright.
Jean-Marc (Jean-Michel Rouzière) works in a clothing store, and one day, he gets into a weird fight with a man in the street. Not knowing if he’s somehow killed the man, Jean-Marc flees the scene. The loss of his umbrella is a kind of emasculation, not to put too fine a point on it (ahem), but that umbrella links him with such forebears as Jacques Tati and Charles Chaplin. The use of melodrama and suspense is more in line with what we’d expect of Rohmer’s fellow New Waver Jacques Rivette, who unfortunately doesn’t contribute to Six in Paris.
“Montparnasse et Levallois” is ” an action film organized by Jean-Luc Godard and filmed by Albert Maysles.” Maysles is best known as an American documentarian, and the “action film” recalls Jackson Pollock’s action paintings. The story features two sculptors, and one of them describes “action sculpture” as allowing the element of chance to determine the structure.
That sounds modern, but Godard’s story isn’t constructed by chance. Rather, chance is used as a narrative device for the heroine, Monica (Joanna Shimkus), who believes she has mixed up two telegrams and sent them to the wrong boyfriends. This idea is elaborated from Godard’s anecdote in A Woman Is a Woman (Une femme est une femme, 1961). Perhaps the construction of the sculptures is a metaphor for the larger construction of Six in Paris.
Claude Chabrol’s “La Muette” closes Six in Paris with the most serious and stylistically playful story. With Chabrol and his wife, Stéphane Audran, as a bickering upper-class couple, the concept is very Chabrolian. The central figure is their young son (Gilles Chusseau), who uses earplugs so he needn’t hear his parents argue or utter their fatuous trivialities.
The soundtrack is silent during those scenes, so “La Muette” is a pun. The phrase’s literal meaning is a mute woman, and muteness is associated with deafness. The boy is rendering himself deaf while also maintaining silence in his family circle. He is silent, for example, about his father’s dalliances with the sexy young maid (Dany Saril), who also never speaks.
The five photographers on Six in Paris are Jean Rabier, Étienne Becker, Alain Levent, Nestor Almendros, and Maysles, but the feature looks consistent from one segment to the next, perhaps because they were all using the same color film and type of camera. Even the stories might as well have been conceived by a single filmmaker.
Chabrol, Rohmer, Godard, and Rouch are famous, while Douchet and Pollet are obscure outside France. Douchet concentrated on television documentaries. Pollet made diverse cult items. Schroeder produced Pollet’s experimental Méditerranée (1963) with a script by poet Philippe Sollers, who makes a cameo in Rohmer’s segment. Pollet’s later films include the hallucinatory Tu imagines Robinson (1967), the science fiction film Le maitre du temps (1970), and a radical construction called Le Sang (1971). He needs further exploration.
Icarus Films released the digital restoration of Six in Paris on DVD in February 2021, and this new edition marks its Blu-ray debut.