Crimes of Paris_ A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection - Dorothy Hoobler [10]
Movies were, of course, another way of transcending space and time, for they could preserve and reproduce the images of past events. The Parisian Charles Pathé pioneered the first newsreels, which permitted theatergoers to view events of the day as if they had been eyewitnesses. (Because cameras could not always get to scenes in time to film the actual events, Pathé and his imitators often reenacted them with actors.) By 1913, Pathé owned the largest cinema in Paris, which included the world’s largest screen and a sixty-piece orchestra.
Léon Gaumont was one of the first filmmakers to discover that audiences would return on a regular basis if he divided his movie stories into installments, or serials. Crime stories, adventures, and even Wild West thrillers influenced by American novels drew enormous audiences to Paris’s theaters. The month after the theft of the Mona Lisa, Parisians were flocking to see Zigomar, the first of a series that pitted an archcriminal against the Paris police — inevitably concluding with the triumph of the forces of evil.
Jean-Paul Sartre recalled going to the movies with his mother as a child in Paris:
The show had begun. We would stumblingly follow the usherette. I would feel I was doing something clandestine. Above our heads, a shaft of light crossed the hall; one could see dust and vapor dancing in it. A piano whinnied away. Violet pears shone on the walls.… I would scrape my back against knees and take my place on a creaky seat. My mother would slide a folded blanket under my behind to raise me. Finally, I would look at the screen. I would see a fluorescent chalk and blinking landscapes streaked with showers; it always rained, even when the sun shone brightly, even in apartments. At times, an asteroid in flames would shoot across the drawing-room of a baroness without her seeming to be surprised. I liked that rain, that restless anxiety which played on the wall. The pianist would attack the overture to Fingal’s Cave and everyone understood that the criminal was about to appear: the baroness would be frightened out of her wits. But her beautiful, sooty face would make way for a purple show-card: “End of Part I.” I saw Zigomar and Fantômas, The Exploits of Maciste, The Mysteries of New York… As for me, I wanted to see the film as close up as possible.… I was utterly content, I had found the world in which I wanted to live, I touched the absolute. What an uneasy feeling when the lights went on: I had been wracked with love for the characters and they had disappeared, carrying their world with them. I had felt their victory in my bones; yet it was theirs and not mine. In the street I found myself superfluous. 33
Time was altered not only by speed but also by the erasure of night. The electrification of the city transformed Paris, obliterating old patterns in great washes of illumination. The impressionists had often taken their canvases and paints into the countryside and worked in the midst of nature under sunlight. Picasso, on the other hand, liked to sleep during the day and paint at night by artificial light. He was far from alone in his after-midnight activities.
Though electricity could illuminate a city, it was itself invisible, one of a number of unseen forces scientists were now discovering. Radio waves could send a message across a continent; X-rays could expose the inside of the body; and radioactivity had other, not yet fully understood, powers. Picasso and his fellow artists were aware that these scientific discoveries were changing the world and that art would have to change with them. In 1840, the invention of photography by two Frenchmen had doomed the academic artists who sought to portray the world as it appeared to the eye: now any photographer could do that perfectly. There was a growing awareness that artists would have to uncover a deeper reality beneath the everyday appearances of things. Maurice Maeterlinck,