This is one of many amateur films made by Castleford bookmaker Eric Bolderson.  Eric got into making films after he broke his neck on his twenty second birthday in a rugby match in 1949.  He was paralysed for about six months, and had to wear a plaster jacket and leather collar for four years.  During this time Eric bought himself a cine camera, and eventually an expensive Bolex 16mm, which he used for most of the films he made, mostly in the Castleford area, in the 1950s and 1960s (and which...

This is one of many amateur films made by Castleford bookmaker Eric Bolderson.  Eric got into making films after he broke his neck on his twenty second birthday in a rugby match in 1949.  He was paralysed for about six months, and had to wear a plaster jacket and leather collar for four years.  During this time Eric bought himself a cine camera, and eventually an expensive Bolex 16mm, which he used for most of the films he made, mostly in the Castleford area, in the 1950s and 1960s (and which he still has).  He would show the films in a makeshift cinema in his small attic. For more on Eric see the Context for Winter Wonderland Fantasy (1958).

Given that Eric was a bookmaker, taking over his father’s business, it is perhaps no wonder that half of the film in Paris is at the racecourse – the checking of the racing results on the train gives it away.  In a recorded interview with his sister, who was also on the trip, Eric states that although they didn’t win anything, they had an enjoyable time, especially observing the fashions.   He also says that the whole trip cost just £9 (roughly £183 in today’s money). Their visit to the Longchamp race course (the Hippodrome de Longchamp) was actually during its centenary year, opening in 1857.  It is situated on the banks of the Seine in the Bois de Boulogne district of Paris.  Apart from being the most famous racecourse in France, it is also one of the world’s foremost thoroughbred racing venues.  They may well have timed their visit to see one of the great races held there, such as the 1000 and 2000 Guineas, or the Grand Prix de Paris – the Prix de L’Arc de Triomphe isn’t held until October. 

It is here that they meet the entertaining and colourful African.  Given that he is inside the stadium he was probably seen as good for tourism, unlike the many African street sellers in Paris, often plying their trade illegally, who can be seen around such attractions as the Eiffel Tower trying to sell their trinkets.   Like Britain, after the Second World War France encouraged immigration from its colonies, mostly from North Africa, to come because of a shortage of labour.  Some 200,000 of these were from Algeria, although with the outbreak of the Algerian War for Independence in 1954, these were stopped from coming.  

Tourists from Britain had been coming to Paris, of course, for a long time, but this had been confined to a small wealthy section of the population until the 1950s, when the growth in living standards allowed ordinary working class holidaymakers to make places like Paris a place to visit – something virtually unheard of ten years before.  Yet as far as their own citizens were concerned, after the 1848 revolution Paris was re-designed by Haussmann, with his broad boulevards, to rid the inner city of the lower classes, and stop them building barricades. This did not stop the building of barricades during the insurrection in 1871 though that led to the short lived Paris Commune.  The suppression of this led to the loss of 20,000 Communards, but it was to the much smaller number of victims on the other side that the Basilica of the Sacred Heart of Paris (or Sacré-Cœur) at the top of Montmartre, was dedicated to. 

As much as the usual attractions, it is the atmosphere of the city that has drawn people to it.  This was captured beautifully in the photographs of Robert Doisneau, and also in the many films located in Paris in the 1950s.  Among those from 1957 are La Seine a rencontré Paris, The Sun also Rises and Love in the Afternoon and the following year saw Gigi and Chabrol's Le Beau Serge, to name just a few.  This was the time when the French New Wave Cinema was beginning, with directors like Truffaut, Godard and Rohmer.

Paris has a long history of developing radical new artistic movements and ideas.  Many of the ideas of the enlightenment coalesced here in the run-up to the French Revolution in 1879, which in turn threw up its own iconoclastic radicals, such as Marat and deSade.   Soon after came the so-called utopian socialists (as Marx dubbed them) Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier: the former being born in Paris, the latter dying there.  It was here in the early nineteenth century that the term Bohemian was born, and this was to become closely associated with Paris, especially at the turn of the twentieth century, and especially in Montmartre.  The legacy of this can be seen in the film, when they view the work of the street artists.  The list of names of the artists drawn to Montmartre is staggering: among them Dalí, Modigliani, Monet, Mondrian and van Gogh.  After this, at the communal Le Bateau-Lavoir, where Pablo Picasso lived for a time, many great artists and writers would come and experience the bohemian lifestyle.   Before then Toulouse-Lautrec plied his trade here, including his famous cabaret posters, most notably for Moulin Rouge and Le Chat Noir, where one could find Erik Satie at the piano playing his inimitable compositions.

And so it goes on throughout the twentieth century, and not only in the arts, but also in the world of ideas.  The surrealism of Andre Breton, that burst onto the scene in the Paris of the 1920s, combined the two.   Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, and perhaps Camus, are the most famous intellectuals to be seen in Paris in the 1950s – all becoming politically involved with the support for Algerian independence – but there were many more.  Among the lesser known, but still very influential, are Jean Wahl, Jacques Lacan, Jean François Lyotard, George Bataille, Michel Foucault and Satre’s fellow existentialist, Maurice Merleau-Ponty (and the list goes on and on).

Another fascinating current to emerge in Paris at this time was Psychogeography.   In 1957 Guy Debord produced a guide of Paris, The Naked City to follow one he made the year before, subtitled ‘psychogeographic slopes of the drift and the location of unities of ambiance’.  The idea behind this was to explore the way that places affected ones psychology and behaviour.  Debord was a Parisian who founded the Lettrist International and after that the Situational International, and was also a filmmaker himself – as well as the author of the influential book  Society of the Spectacle.  He was continuing a tradition that might be dated back to the notion of the flâneur  developed by Baudelaire: “To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world” (The Painter of Modern Life, p. 9).  This was an aspect of nineteenth century Paris life that the philosopher Walter Benjamin would later use to shine a light on the whole experience of modernity. 

The Paris of the 1950s was such a vibrant place that it drew artists to it from all over, and especially from the US: Gene Kelly was not the only American in Paris, and hardly the first.  Since the nineteenth century many had come over to Paris and found inspiration.  Among the most famous in the twentieth century are Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein .  There were roughly 2,000 Americans in France during the Second World War, including Gertrude Stein, Alice B Toklas, Sylvia Beach, the owner of the famous bookshop Shakespeare and Company, and the daring Josephine Baker, who joined the Free French forces and was awarded the Croix de Guerre and the Legion of Honour for her work with the French Resistance.

Paris had also been especially welcoming to African-Americans, more so than most places in the States.  Among the early black pioneers was the artist Henry Ossawa Tanner.   After the First World War jazz took root here, including Josephine Baker arriving in 1925, and has stayed ever since.  An African-American community settled in Montmartre in the inter-war years, providing a place for others to follow. The American connection was also to be seen with the nightclub La Grosse Pomme in Montmartre, run by American jazz singer Adelaide Hall and her husband Bert Hicks, where Django Reinhardt’s and Stéphane Grappelli’s Quintette du Hot Club de France played before the war.   

In the 1950s there were some fifteen hundred African-Americans living in Paris, including many GIs.  This encouraged  black jazz musicians to find a home in Paris, such as Sidney Bechet in the Club Bobino.  Others, like Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn often played there in clubs like the Mars Club, which in 1958 and 1959 was managed by a young American couple, Barney and Barbara Butler.  It was in Paris that Strayhorn and Ellington wrote the music for the film Paris Blues.  It was also here that Miles Davis fell in love with Juliette Greco, and wrote in his Autobiography: “Everything changed while I was in Paris.  It was like magic, almost like I had been hypnotized . . . It was April in Paris and, yeah, I was in love.”  This hospitality extended to writers as well as musicians.  African-American writers living in Paris in the 1950s included Richard Wright, James Baldwin and Chester Himes, rubbing shoulders with fellow outsiders Jean Genet and Samuel Beckett.  For more on this see the set of DVDs made by Joanne Burke When African Americans came to Paris and the fascinating article by Tyler Stovall (References).  

It is not surprising that 1957 was the year that beat poets Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso arrived in Paris, along with the highly influential novelist William Burroughs, staying for six years at a cheap hotel on rue-Git-Le-Coeur in Paris's Left Bank; thus contributing to the fame that this part of Paris has gained over the years.

All of this seems a far cry from our band of merry tourists on their weekend in Paris.  But it was just the combination of all this fervent artistic, intellectual and political activity that made Paris what it was in the 1950s.  Whether or not Eric and his party were aware of all these happenings – possibly just on the fringes – it still provides an important backdrop for our film.  Those visiting Paris today might well reflect that much has been lost since that time.

References

Charles Baudelaire,The Painter of Modern Life, Da Capo Press, New York, 1964.

Howard Caygill, Walter Benjamin: the colour of experience, Routledge, 1998

David McCullough, The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris, Simon & Schuster, 2011.

Dan Franck, The Bohemians : the birth of modern art, Paris, 1900-1930, Phoenix, London, 2002.

Jacques Yonnet, Paris noir: the secret history of a city, Dedalus, 2006.

Walter Benjamin, Paris – Capital of the Nineteenth Century - online

Guy Debord 1957: Psychogeographic guide of Paris, imaginary museum

Denis Wood, ‘Lynch Debord: About Two Psychogeographies’

Tyler Stovall, Harlem-Sur-Seine: Building An African American Diasporic Community In Paris, Stanford Electronic Humanities Review, Volume 5.2 1997.

Literary Expatriates in Paris