Louvre City
Jean-Michel Frodon / Article taken from “Histoire de produire, Les Films d’Ici”, a work published for a retrospective devoted to the production company Les Films d’Ici, at the Infinity Festival, Alba (Italy) – March / April 2004
La Ville Louvre isn’t a documentary on the Louvre Museum. La Ville Louvre is a fantasy film, a musical, a political pamphlet, an action movie, a comedy, and a lot of other things too. Anything you like but a documentary on the Louvre Museum. It begins with rhythmical sounds like hammering, flashing lights, shapes making up a sort of Rorschach test. And then come motion and movements that more or less match, synchronizing in a perceptible or imperceptible manner.
Hey! Look! Three umbrellas. What are they doing here? They’re the umbrellas of Cherbourg, those of Singin’ in the rain, a quick, merry and discreet reference in passing. Musicality and bodily movements form the lively and joyous foundation of this style of cinema. A sea monster approaches, giving off beams of light. Machines, and heavy, solid materials respond to the injunction imposed by the centuries that, without kicking up a big fuss, nonetheless look down at us from the tip of the invisible pyramid. “It’s not so hard, Fragonard!” All set, the huge painting flies off at the end of its apple green and deep purple straps – a homage to Jacques Demy! We are in the world of choreography, a ballet of material and pulsations that tries to take shape with the help of broad-shouldered men in overalls.
This shape is that of a body, perceived without ever being shown, a mere glimpse of one part allowing us to imagine it in its entirety. A huge body with its organs, arteries, nervous impulses and illnesses. We can see it as a social body that contains buildings, human beings of every kind, objects bequeathed by other humans, now deceased, and where yet other humans often feature, the same one at times, or not the same one but with a similar name (Diana the huntress and Diane de Poitiers, for example). This body will never be named once in the course of a film in which nothing is presented in a didactic or explanatory manner. This is the Louvre Museum in Paris, France, at a time when Michel Laclotte was its director and when Dominique Païni created a national museums cinematic service (worth a lot more than the French army’s similar organisation). This body is also a museum, the museum, a major cultural institution, an institution.
Nicolas Philibert never gets ahead of what he films. He doesn’t know what to think of an unusual or impressive situation. Or at least he makes sure that he doesn’t say so. He opens his eyes and his ears. He sees the blue of the cleaner’s overalls and the blue of the Holy Virgin’s robes in a painting. He hears the running feet of the heroes of Bande à part in the firemen’s training. He looks for Belphegor without finding him behind hidden doors, trapdoors that open up in the ground, and concealed staircases. No need to invent stories: they are here, hundreds of them. A corner of a painting, for instance, can fuel the imagination as a cultural gem, but also as a souvenir of movies relating the theft of paintings from museums. There is no need to say that we like painting or that culture is important. The images on the screen are the perfect confirmation of that.
La Ville Louvre tells a story. Or, if you prefer, outlines a treatise in economics. The film relates the movements required to create the immobility of museums, what one has to take from the present to give eternity to the works of the past, all the physical and technical work that goes into a spiritual and artistic project. Because the film is indeed one long song of love, admiration and gratitude to the decision of the French Revolution to throw open to the people the king’s palace while giving them access to works of art belonging to the aristocracy. This is what Philibert films but in a strictly materialistic manner, simply outlining the procedures and work that go into this arrangement with time and matter. This is the daily existence of men and women without whom a great idea never becomes a reality.
To film all this, one must nonetheless respect one basic rule: no metaphors. That’s a tough requirement to meet when you’re filming in the world’s greatest storehouse of visual symbols. This black marble slave carried by two workers dressed in green along the banks of the Seine while a female curator in a business suit walks along in the same shot, what does that mean? Nothing, everything, anything you want. It’s the same with each shot. The poetic power of the images is greater than any words. In this tidal wave of imagination that is proportional to the apparent simplicity of the situations, the surrealistic gunshot of a young woman in scarlet shorts and the difficult and knowledgeable positioning of canvases that will cover a wall of a small room in the 18th century French art department conspire together within the merry musicality of the cinematic composition. Until the final “canto”, a capella, that reflects – as is only right – two galleries of portraits: human beings in the paintings, human beings in the museum. All of them are motionless: the movement and rhythm exists between them. The whole world lies therein.