Mr. Eiffel and his tower, the Grande Roue and Moulin de la Galette, the actress Polaire and her wasp waist, Sarah Bernhardt, Mounet Sully, Lucien Guitry and their voices, the anarchist violence, as antiquated in style as the seats of the first metro, the first Wallace fountains and the first urinals, the first airplanes and the bird-man who dig himself a 14 cm grave flying over the Eiffel Tower, the floods of 1910 and, as a finale, the train full of soldiers, happy to leave, for the First World War, with the last passenger car shrinking in the distance to make room for the words THE END, like the platform train cars in the happy endings of American films! […] Nicole Vedrès and her small crew created something of monstrous beauty, and its appearance on the screen upset cinema’s aesthetic standards with the same radicalism that Proust had upset those of the novel. […] Proust’s reward with In Search of Lost Time was the ineffable joy of sinking into the depths of memory. Instead here, the aesthetic joy stems from a rift because those memories are not our own. They create a paradox of an objective past, a memory outside of our consciousness. Cinema is the perfect vehicle for capturing time so it is then easier to lose. Paris 1900 marks the birth of cinema-specific Tragedy, the tragedy of Time.

André Bazin, Paris 1900. À la recherche du temps perdu, in “L’Écran français”, September 30, 1947, republished in Cinéma français de la Libération à la Nouvelle Vague (1945-1958), “Cahiers du Cinéma”, Paris 1983

De l’origine del XXIe siècle was a commissioned film made in 2000 for the opening-night of the Cannes Film Festival, and in the words of Godard it was an attempt. “I have tried to cover the memories of the atrocious explosions and crimes with children’s faces and the tears and smiles of women”. The attempt was bound to fail since there is no cure for the horrors of the last century in a retrospective of this kind.

Michael Althen