ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the film Etudes sur Paris directed by Andre Sauvage. After having made his La traversee du Grepon and Portrait de la Grece, writer, painter, photographer, filmmaker, producer, and passionate traveler Sauvage made a feature-length portrait of Paris. Sauvage starts on the city's outskirts, exploring a landscape gradually getting more industrialized and urbanized before approaching its core. The film contains footage of the famous Paris monuments, but, first and foremost, it focuses on the everyday spaces and the anonymous urbanites. Sauvage's use of tilted angles, reverse motion, fast motion, and superimpositions rarely evokes the kineticism of the metropolis, as in the films by Walter Ruttmann and Dziga Vertov, instead, his special effects turn Paris into a place of estrangement and a site of Surreal encounters. Many of Sauvage's shots are reminiscent of the photographs of Eugene Atget, whom Sauvage considered a "grand metteur en scène".
