ABSTRACT
They Had to See Paris. And in order to see it, a traditional family from rural Oklahoma who had struck it rich in oil, depicted in a little-known 1929 comedy by Frank Borzage, decides to go there. But why did they have to see Paris instead of New York, London, Berlin, or Tokyo? Because they had already seen it. They had seen photographs in newspapers and films and read descriptions of the City of Light. The image of Paris was the most propagated in the world, and the logic of tourism takes them to the place they already know from visual media. They had to see Paris because they had a memory of the city, even if they had never been there. Even as they decide to cut their visit down to a couple of days, feeling homesick after having covered the sights reproduced in the media, their choice of destination indicates how images of places format memory. The main production value of Borzage’s film is a series of views of Paris, which serve to perpetuate the image propagation that makes the rural family want go there in the first place. The simple denomination of Paris in the film’s title releases swarms of images and expectations and demonstrates the close relation between memory, images, and topographical location. For this reason, memory always takes place, as images are spatial and topographic. I will probe this topographical layout of memories as sociotechnical networks of images by looking at a well-known (psycho-)geographical location, Paris, and the visual construction of its mnemotechnical properties. 1
