Director’s Intent

My partner and I were always going to live in Paris. A good first line for a film, I think. Everything changed after I wrote that line: we never made it to Paris, the dream didn’t survive the marriage, my documentary about Paris became a fictional story of a filmmaker who moves to Paris to make a film about her childhood and Paris came to signify not the future, but the past. Les Passages is about memory, and dreams and false starts. It is inspired by Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project, a collection of fragments about the 19th century Paris passages and what he called “the fate of art.” But as I got deeper into the meaning of his book, this, a more personal film, emerged. Benjamin was drawn to Paris in his youth and he famously wrote: “Not to find one’s way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance – nothing more. But to lose oneself in a city – as one loses oneself in a forest – that calls for quite a different schooling. Then, signboards and street names, passers-by, roofs, kiosks speak to the wanderer like a cracking twig. Paris taught me this art of straying; it fulfilled a dream that had shown its first traces in the labyrinths on the pages of my exercise books.” I chose to structure my film this way: to think of it as fragments, life-as-a-sequence-of-moments rather than life-as-narrative. This also seemed very French. There’s a story, of course (because I need story), about love of course (because we all need love). But I hope that it goes deeper than the surface of things, and that this personal film becomes a film about seeing.