If you love cinema, you should travel to Paris. It would probably take weeks just to track down the locations of the most important film classics. If you don’t have that much time, you can now find tips for routes in a travel guide for cineastes.
In 2010, actress Angelina Jolie was in Paris for the filming of the film “The Tourist”.
Those: pa / dpa / awi
Eone city, one topic. You can travel like this too. There are people who visit Vienna just to sit in coffee houses, go to Berlin just to try out the clubs, or go to Buenos Aires with the aim of finally learning tango. And passionate cinema fans best go to – no, not Hollywood. Paris!
Here, in the heart of the opera district, cinema was born. No place in the world can look back on such a long and dense film history. To date, there is no city in Europe that has more cinemas than the French capital. And to track down the locations of the most important film classics alone, you would probably have to be on the road in Paris for weeks.
If you only have a weekend, you can now put together your route with a travel guide for cineastes. “Paris and the Cinema” (publisher Henschel, 22 euros) combs the city for highlights and peculiarities of film history on 21 walks.
And it began, where else, in the café: on December 28, 1895, the brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière demonstrated their cinematographs in the “Grand Café” on the Boulevard des Capucines. The very first cinema film in the history of the world lasted 50 seconds – and despite the awkward name “The arrival of a train at the station in La Ciotat”, the audience literally got out of their armchairs: the audience jumped up in horror because they believed that the train was about to get into them coffee would roll.
In 1895, the Lumière brothers screened the film The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station in a Parisian café
What: pa/akg-images
The dull Lumière brothers were unaware of the power of illusion contained in their invention. At best, they saw a scientific benefit in it and refused to sell it. But part of the magic of the moment – one was in Paris – was that a magician was present at the premiere: Georges Méliès knew immediately that this cinematograph was an earth-shattering invention. He rebuilt it, made over 500 films and has been considered a master of special effects ever since.
All of Paris is a film set
Today, around 20 films are shot in Paris every day, 100 to 130 films are made here every year, and the number of classic Paris feature films seems incalculable.
Director Bernardo Bertolucci (left) and actor Marlon Brando during the shooting of the 1972 film “The Last Tango in Paris”.
What: pa/akg-images
Author Christine Siebert, however, has worked her way through it meticulously, in tireless forays through the neighborhoods she leads to the places where it happened: Jean-Paul Belmondo aka small-time crook Michel is shot dead in the Rue Campagne Première in Montparnasse because his girlfriend (Jean Seberg) ratted him out – the final scene of Out of Breath.
In 1929, in the “Studio des Ursulines”, a cinema in the Latin Quarter, a nervous Luis Buñuel armed himself with stones – in order to defend himself against an angry audience if necessary, but to his astonishment the premiere of “The Andalusian Dog” went off without a hitch.
A boy named Jean-Paul Sartre goes to the 115-year-old Cinéma du Panthéon to watch films with his mother. Catherine Deneuve furnished the tea room on the top floor, which is so comfortable today.
Catherine Deneuve furnished the salon on the top floor of the Cinéma du Panthéon
Quelle: pa/Gilles Targat/Photo12
All of Paris is a film set – but not without deceptions. The Abbesses metro station in Amélie, where the photo booths are located, is actually a dead platform of the Porte de Lilas station – accessible only to film crews.
And, the bitter truth for all couples who post their selfies from Pont Neuf: The real bridge plays no part in “The Lovers of Pont Neuf”. The film was shot in the Camargue, the cinema bridge is just a replica.