Northwest Film Forum

The Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, poodles and couture houses and oo la la. We all know Paris. But there is—or was—another city just underneath that top layer, a city of poor people and tenements, factories and slaughterhouses, crime and vice and revolt. Over one evening, acclaimed Brooklyn-based writer and historian Luc Sante shows us the dark side of one of the world's most beautiful cities and provides commentary throughout.

The Other Paris explores the Parisian underbelly from three directions. There are, first, the counter-travelogues, from the plunge through the class structure in Louis Feuillade's Juve contre Fantômas (1915) to the elevated-train tour—featuring an apparent murder—in Maurice Cam's Métropolitain (1939) to the headlong stumble through the streets (with a wounded driver) in Jules Dassin's Rififi (1955). 

Realism blurs into myth with Alberto Cavalcanti's Rien que les heures (1930), a bal musette in Anatole Litvak's Coeur de lilas (1932), and Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin's Chronique d'un été (1961). 

We are brought bracingly back to reality as Maurice Pialat chronicles the rise of the banlieue in L'Amour existe (1960), and the whole story concludes as a slapstick parable: the battle of Little Big Horn set among the ruins of Les Halles, in Marco Ferreri's frantic Don't Touch the White Woman (1974). 

>> Tickets for this performance are $12/Film Forum Members, $15/General Admission, and can be purchased online or by phone from Brown Paper Tickets at 1.800.838.3006.

"The French look differently upon crime; there’s a heroic aspect—at least in literature and film—to the man who refuses to live by bourgeois values. A bohemian himself, and a chronicler of New York’s Lower East Side during the ’70s, Sante has always sided with the outsiders." —Brian Miller, Seattle Weekly

"Best known for Low Life, his book-length portrait of Manhattan’s underclass in the early 20th century, Luc Sante is the Belgian-born polymath who’s spent the past 30 years writing about social history and art. This week at Northwest Film Forum, Sante gives a live performance that explores his twin obsessions onscreen" —David Schmader, The Stranger Suggests

ABOUT THE ARTIST
Luc Sante was born in Belgium and emigrated to the U.S. as a child. His connections to film are many. He has been a film critic (for Interview, Premiere, and Wigwag magazines, as well as for Slate); he has acted (in Sara Driver's You Are Not I and The Bowery, among others); he has consulted (on Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York); and he co-wrote and co-directed the short film Le Bled: Buildings in a Field, with Jem Cohen (2009). Over the past thirty years he has written about photography, social history, popular music, literature and art in many contexts and formats. His books include Low Life, Evidence, The Factory of Facts, Kill All Your Darlings, Folk Photography, and La Canaille: Paris and Its Rabble, which will be published in 2014. He teaches writing and the history of photography at Bard College, and he is a 2012-2013 Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library.