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Voyage a Paris - a film explained by Bart Verschaffel

Voyage à Paris

Jef Cornelis, Rudi Laermans - 1993

Bart Verschaffel and Hatto Fischer

Voyage à Paris is about looking and being looked at, about fashion and consumption, and about people's fascination with Paris, the Capital of the 19th Century. Paris was given this honorary title for the trend-setting part it played in designing modern cosmopolitan space: the way in which Baron Haussman redeveloped 'le vieux Paris'. It served as a model for countless later attempts at revamping urban tissues. But, more than anything else, Paris was the first city in the world where modern fashion and consumption punctuated the city life. In the previous century, architecture and commerce concluded a new pact, which yielded highly striking consumptive spaces: the galleries at the Palais-Royal were succeeded by the first passages' (shopping arcades), and then the department stores along the Haussman's Boulevards.

 

Voyage à Paris is about the Paris of today and mythical Paris, about the often banal reality of  buying and selling on the one hand and the world-famous 19th century Paris as we know if from the brochures on the other. Letters about life in Paris in the previous century liven up the images, and also remind us of the now unthinkable fashion, consumption and metropolitan life. The letters and images are tangential, since they treat the same places (such as 'The Bon Marché) or situations (such as shopping in the 'rue Saint-Honoré). But the enthusiastic and poetic tone of the quoted texts invariably contradicts what we are being shown: what used to be exciting has become perfectly ordinary. The consciously built-in gap between textual past and visual present wishes to underline the consumer society's early utopian dimension. Voyage à Paris thus wants to set our critical memory working, to have us reflecting on the banal present by means of a detour via what used to be a utopian laden past. In this respect too, the film owes

a lot to Walter Benjamin's unfinished Passagen-Werk, the immediate source of inspiration of Rudi Laerman's script.

 

Voyage à Paris is not a traditional documentary that wishes to give objective information about 'what is' or 'what used to be'. This short film further explores the genre of the 'visual essay', which Jef Cornelis has already experimented with in the past. Voyage à Paris singles out a number of pivotal figures from the metropolitan confusion and magnifies them. Text and editing try to form an argument: the stream of images 'demonstrates' that the advent of the consumer society has primarily changed people and things into 'show-pieces'. This, basically, means that every metropolis is first and foremost a virtually endless collection of show-boxes-shop or display-windows, cafés, department stores, restaurants, human bodies laden with goods. Glimpsing and visualising, looking and looking back dominate metropolitan life, which revolves both around buying and selling. The ultimate figure, the most accurate emblem of today's consumer society

and is Walhalla, the modern metropolis, has to be the prostitute, both human being and commodity, made for looking at, object of desire to be consumed.

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