Notre-Dame de Paris as Cinema: From Myth to Commodity

Notre-Dame de Paris, ¹ as Georges Piroué once argued, ² is in many respects a film waiting to happen. Time, space and action are handled with a freedom which the cinema would make commonplace to twentieth-century cinema audiences, but which 1830s France could not readily accommodate in the theatre but only in the 'spectacle dans un fauteuil' of the novel. Around the Hugolian reworking of the myth of Beauty and the Beast, subplots and digressions proliferate and intertwine. The larger-than-life protagonists enact their stories in close-up against a background of the surging masses of the truands and the fifteenth-century Paris crowd, with, as the middle-ground, the individual representatives of the established order and their underworld counterparts. Setting and point of view shift vertiginously and constantly: plunging and soaring between the heights of Notre-Dame and the depths of the oubliettes of the Palais de Justice; crisscrossing city and river; stretching out to the surrounding villages and to Montfaucon; and on again, over the horizon, to the coronation city of Rheims. Time, likewise, escapes the constraints of 1482, as the narratorial voice roams back into the mists of Antiquity and also forward, not only to the imminent discovery of the New World of the Americas, but also to the French Revolution, three centuries ahead, and beyond that again, to the revolutionary activity of July 1830, and the writing of the novel itself.