The Seine Meets Paris
Director Joris Ivens
Countries France
Duration 32 min
Synopsis
Told from the perspective of a boat trip through the city, it features scenes of daily life along the river. A fundamental idea of the film was to show Parisians strolling, loving, working beside the Seine, to give a portrait of their life through the river. In order to represent Paris as the capital of high fashion and to show aristocratization of its banks, which begins at Pont Sully, Ivens needed the mannequins and their photographer. In placing a fisherman with a dead fish on his line beside the Seine and having a fisherman pulled out at the moment of filming he was not wrong at all, he mixed the richness of popular life and extraordinariness of a permanent spectacle on the river. The film won the award for Best Documentary at Cannes Film Festival, San Francisco and Oberhausen, in 1958/9.
Told from the perspective of a boat trip through the city, it features scenes of daily life along the river. A fundamental idea of the film was to show Parisians strolling, loving, working beside the Seine, to give a portrait of their life through the river. In order to represent Paris as the capital of high fashion and to show aristocratization of its banks, which begins at Pont Sully, Ivens needed the mannequins and their photographer. In placing a fisherman with a dead fish on his line beside the Seine and having a fisherman pulled out at the moment of filming he was not wrong at all, he mixed the richness of popular life and extraordinariness of a permanent spectacle on the river. The film won the award for Best Documentary at Cannes Film Festival, San Francisco and Oberhausen, in 1958/9.