After the Louvre, Jenny and I managed--unusually on this trip, in a Paris in the grip of transit strike--to take the métro: it wasn't totally closed, but mostly what was running as usual were the automated lines, and those at several times capacity. Happily, the two museums' locations are linked by an automated line, so we got to use one of our sweetly old-fashioned paper billets:
The transit authority has been phasing out paper tickets in favor of rechargeable cards, which we would have used if the system had been running as usual. A happy accident that we visited Paris before the full phase-out, and a nice coincidence that we got to use an older-fashioned medium on the way to considering the history of film!
That was at the Cinématheque, a combination cinema, museum / exhibit space, research library, and bookstore all focused on film. The Gehry-designed building (2005) is its own marvelous blend of old and new, computer-assisted as per that architect's usual and also echoing some of the surrounding buildings in a fairly commercial and transit-oriented section of the city (a major rail station is nearby).
Although in planning we were a little disappointed by the films on offer--December was a Hitchcock retrospective, which is fine, but in English, whereas we wanted French--it was another happy coincidence that the museum, beyond its regular collections, was hosting a special exhibit on the history of vampires in film, de Dracula à Buffy! I drooled. I also mugged:
I'd played Vampire: the Masquerade nearly every Friday night for the last two years of high school, and so the whole exhibit was a treat--for me, I assume for some people witnessing me, I can assure you not for Jenny witnessing me--with special treats including materials from '90s interventions in the mythos including costumes from Interview with the Vampire and Bram Stoker's Dracula:
(Even in only clothing, Tom Cruise is lifted higher than his--*child*--co-star!)
I. DROOLED.
(Oldman's-as-Dracula's dragon-themed housecoat; Ryder's-as-Mina's regal dragonic dress.)
... um. Weird personal high-points aside, the exhibit was terrific, working chronologically through historical influences on vampires-in-film including earliest such literature in English (Polidori's maligned The Vampyre, the only fully-formed work to come out of a famous ghost-story evening [and for that matter, attributed wrongly to Byron] ... aside from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Stoker's fin-de-siècle send-up [I'm convinced: it cannot be serious] including autograph manuscript pages) ...
... and side-by-side comparisons of different 'classic' vampires on screen, including Bara's and, of course, Lugosi's:
Lower-right was a surprise, Goya's El sueño de la razón produce monstruos, a splendid etching that has of course played a big role in thought about / after Enlightenment--and which I hadn't realized is so small, not much bigger than, let's say, an iPhone. Also surprising but thematically on point were images from the tradition of illustrating Dante, including a depiction of the pilgrim and his guide, Virgil (who will return on my own katabasis or 'journey below' into the Catacombs):
From the bookstore, I left with just a couple items: I'd long been hoping to find a slender volume on the great early filmmaker Georges Méliès, but they were out of the particular French series; and so instead I got a little Biercean dictionary of French portmanteaus made up to account for various stupid tropes on-screen: hilarious reading as we find fun ways to deepen our knowledge of French.
Tomorrow, two more museums of sorts, one near the very height of Montmartre to the north, the other farthest south and deep underground!
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