Rivette: Le Pont du Nord (1982)

Set over a couple of days in Paris, this visionary film follows a pair of vagabonds, played by mother and daughter Bulle and Pascale Ogier, who stumble across, and try to decipher, what appears to be an occult, mystical map of the city. Shot entirely on location, the camera never ventures inside, making for an extraordinary evocation of early 80s Paris, which is very much the main character of the film. Among other things, this is a city where pedestrians have finally conceded that they’ve been outnumbered by vehicles, as all the sightlines, boulevards and promenades of late nineteenth-century Paris are gradually replaced with an entirely new, late-twentieth century configuration, vortically attuned to motorcyclists in a weird, distant echo of Cocteau’s Orpheus. At least, motorcyclists feel like the most discernible descendents of  pedestrians in this strange new metropolis, as Rivette centrifuges Paris around its monumental roundabouts as never before, until it feels as if the very sky is starting to slip down into the city. Helicopters quickly segue into the omniscient flux of traffic, which itself starts to collapse into the white noise of “absolute surveillance” – what one of the vagabonds describes as a “gaze that chases anything that moves,” dark forces descending from the air. On the one hand, that makes it feel like the action’s continually ascending, trying to get up into the sky, trying to reach the level where Paris becomes an aerial city, distributed across the strata that might be occupied by skyscrapers somewhere else. But that’s not really possible – even the top of the Arc de Triomphe feels like just another street – meaning that the vagabonds also seek out the all tiny pedestrian zones that have been left intact, spaces between the streets, nooks, crannies and wedges just big enough to accommodate a single person, as if these alternative vehicles for navigating the city were paradoxically the only residues of the “wide open spaces” of pedestrian life. It all makes for a film that hides in plain sight, suffused with late autumn light, and caressed by a camera that’s so soft and delicate that it seems to bring the texture of the city into existence, only to pull it away from us with every new shot – the kind of agonistic, spontaneous warmth that could perhaps only be fulfilled by a mother and daughter acting together. In the breadth of its urban ambition, it’s a natural companion piece and corrective to Paris Belongs To Us – a devastating vision of post-revolutionary Paris, set amidst a mass of rubble and reconstruction, where even “1980 is already a long time ago.”