Paris, Day Four

Tonight is our last night in Paris, at least for now. As long as our Eurostar tickets will allow, we will coming back to Paris and cutting our London stay short by a few days. We have both fallen in love with Paris and her people.

I have seen the city through the lens of so many filmmakers, learned her language since Junior High and still nothing could prepare me for the beauty of Paris. As we sit at a café having our last meal (yet first real meal) and watch as Gay Paris goes by, I realize that there were a lot of things about Paris (and life) that I thought I new but in fact, don’t.

“I met myself in Paris.”

I have so much to learn about who I want to be, or better yet who am I now? Today, we went to Le Centre Pompidou and I got to see my first Warhol, Mann Ray film, Cindy Sherman, Matisse and Barnet Newman. These artists all worked in various forms of art most including film. They understood the power of the motion picture and the still image and how to work with each of these art forms. Sometimes working with a narrative but not always.

These artists are an inspiration to my in my quest to communicate, be it in one frame or twenty-four frames a second. We walked through a new exhibit by Godard, about life and art and the combination of the two. It was amazing to walk through a new work of art by a man that I feel is a true genius, one of the principal players in my favorite film movement of all time.

I have unfortunately not been able to meet up with the mother of the French nouvelle vague Agnes Varda, but I hope to get to see her installation piece when we return. I had hoped to be inspired on this trip to create and try to bring about some sort of creative metamorphosis and I feel like it is going to be a possibility.