August 2007
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Self-confessed cinephile Douglas Kennedy explains why the French capital is the place to be for movie addicts - and is pretty good for foodies, too
Around five minutes' walk from my apartment in St-Germain-des-Prés there is a street called the rue Champollion, a tiny alley off the rue des Ecoles, just around the corner from that centre of high Parisian intellectualism, the Sorbonne.
Architecturally, rue Champollion is something of a write-off, as it has none of the epic grandeur that so defines Paris. Apart from a sleazy fast-food joint and a raffish bar (Le Reflet), there's little to recommend it - unless, like me, you happen to have an addiction known as "cinephilia". According to one of several dictionaries I own, cinephilia is a need to always be hiding in a movie; to be obsessed by cinematic genres and to have a dangerously vast (and absurd) number of trivial movie facts rattling around in your head. More tellingly, most cinephiliacs believe that (to borrow a line from Walker Percy's classic 1961 novel, The Moviegoer) life is frequently more tolerable in a movie - even a bad one.
I grew up in Manhattan, hiding from domestic discord in the little cinemas that dotted my neighbourhood (the Upper West Side). Almost all of them have vanished now, gobbled up by the rise of the dreaded multiplex and the mendacity of property developers. When I first moved to London in the late 1980s, the l'âge d'or of repertory cinema was still in full swing. Ten years on, many of my favourite cinephile hangouts - like the Scala in King's Cross - had ceased to exist.
Which is why, seven years ago, I found myself in an estate agent's office off the rue de Rennes, negotiating in my then-broken French to buy a small studio apartment in a tiny street in the heart of St-Germain-des-Prés. "Are you planning to live in Paris?" the estate agent asked me. "I'm planning to go to movies in Paris," I replied.
Indeed, my little apartment was strategically chosen because it was within walking distance of more than 20 cinemas. Better yet, the adjoining fifth arrondissement was choc-a-bloc with small picture houses, all of which offered numerous refuges for a cinephile like myself.
Indeed, if you want to step out of your hotel into a cinema showing a film by John Ford or Hitchcock or Welles or Howard Hawks, Paris is the city to which you must venture. As a point of departure, first buy Pariscope - the weekly listings magazine (a bargain at 40 cents - or a mere 25 pence). Then head towards the Left Bank on the Métro, get off at Cluny-La Sorbonne, turn left on the Boulevard St Michel (heading in the direction of the Jardins du Luxembourg) and, after two minutes, you'll find yourself on the rue des Ecoles. Just off this street, to your immediate right, is the rue Champollion - on which you will discover three of the best repertory cinemas in Paris - Le Champo, Le Reflet Medicis Logos, and La Filmothèque Quartier Latin. Between them there are seven screens, always showing a remarkable mélange of films - from classic Ealing comedies to obscure Japanese classics and edgy independent films by contemporary American directors.
You can easily structure a few days in the city around its cinemas and their adjoining restaurants. One of the great Parisian brasseries - Le Balzar - is just around the corner from the rue Champollion. The style is austere Art Deco, the weekday clientele members of the Parisian chattering classes, the food exactly what you'd expect from a classic brasserie of this sort (steak au poivre and so forth). Best of all, you're also within walking distance of another of the great eccentric cinemas in Paris - the Accatone on the rue Cujas, which specialises in everything from Italian neorealism to alternative British cinema of the 1980s (something by Derek Jarman is always on show) or scratchy prints of films by Luis Buñuel from his years of Mexican exile during the 1950s.
There are at least a dozen other small cinemas in the fifth arrondissement - but if you head down to the Boulevard St Michel and cross into the sixth, you'll find my local favourite: a dumpy gem called the Action Christine - where seasons of comedies by Ernst Lubitsch compete with some of Fritz Lang's darkest explorations of the human psyche, not to mention seasons of hard-boiled B-movie thrillers from 1950s Hollywood. And nearby, on the rue de Seine, is one of the more stylish (and reasonable) fish restaurants in Paris, which just happens to be called Fish. Opposite is Così, the best sandwich bar in the city, where you can eat for under €10.
As befits a city that considers cinema to be a metropolitan necessity, just about every quarter has a small independent picture house. And if you want to truly experience cinephile fanaticism, jump on the Métro line 14 from Châtelet to Bercy and park yourself in the new Cinémathèque Française. From mid-afternoon to late evening, this ultramodern temple to the cinema - with three screens and more than nine different films on offer per day - is (for any movie fanatic) pure heaven.
In a world where everything these days seems to be an extended time-and-motion study - where every waking second of the day must be used effectively - Paris still embraces the idea that there is nothing wrong with squandering vast amounts of time in darkened rooms, watching flickering imitations of life on a white screen.
And when you emerge from these shadowy havens, the pay-off is a simple one: you are still in Paris.
Douglas Kennedy's latest novel, The Woman in the Fifth (Hutchinson, £12.99), is out now. He was awarded the French decoration of Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres last year.
