Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Based on the autobiographical novel of teacher François Begaudeau, the documentary-
drama is a brilliant reflection of contemporary multiethnic society.
The city has always been uberchic for foreign film directors, whatever their genre: Bern-
ardo Bertolucci's
Last Tango in Paris
(1972) starred Marlon Brando as a grief-stricken
American. Woody Allen's
Everybody Says I Love You
(1996) unfolded on the Left Bank's
quai de la Tournelle, while dream scenes in his subsequent
Midnight in Paris
(2011) evoked
the city in the 1920s. Martin Scorsese's Oscar-winning children's film
Hugo
(2011) paid
tribute to cinema and Parisian film pioneer Georges Méliès through the remarkable adven-
ture of an orphan boy in the 1930s who tends the clocks at a Paris train station. The crazed
antics of Gargamel et al in American movie
Smurfs 2
(2013) were shot on location in Paris
at Cathédrale de Notre Dame.
The world's first paying-public film screening was held in Paris' Grand Café on blvd des
Capucines, 9e, in December 1895 by the Lumière brothers, inventors of 'moving pictures'.
TIMELINE
1895
The world's first paying-public film screening is held in Paris' Grand Café on blvd des
Capucines, 9e, in December 1895 by the Lumière brothers, inventors of 'moving pic-
tures'.
1902
Paris magician-turned filmmaker Georges Méliès (1861-1938) creates the first
science-fiction film with the silent Le Voyage dans la Lune(The Trip to the Moon;
1902).
1920s
French film flourishes. Sound ushers in René Clair's (1898-1981) world of fantasy and
satirical surrealism. Watch Abel Gance's antiwar blockbuster J'Accuse!(I Accuse!;
1919), filmed on actual WWI battlefields.
1930s
