all about the gaze

Some thoughts on

Dans la ville de Sylvia (In the city of Sylvia)
José Luis Guerín, starring Pilar López de Ayala
France, 2007

When I researched the adventures of my great-grandparents in Belle Epoque Strasbourg (1901-1908) I started following the #Strasbourg tag on tumblr and mastodon, and via tumblr I discovered this movie which is set in central Strasbourg (not many movies are, actually, I'd struggle to name another one?!). Took me a while to get hold of it, but this week I got lucky and found a DVD in the library of the Maison Francaise.

So, in Strasbourg, we follow the footsteps of a slightly clumsy young artist who returns to the city in search of a young woman he met there six years earlier. He spends three days looking intensely at a number of women in the streets and in a cafe, stalks one of them (Pilar López de Ayala, who played an obsessive lover herself in Juana la Loca), but eventually has to admit defeat. The conversations of the people he observes in the cafes are strangely muted, so we are left with what is essentially an Eric Rohmer film without the dialogue. Just the glances.

And the glances are getting a bit uncomfortable in a male gaze kind of way. The searchlight of the artist's eyes rests on the young women a little longer than would be socially acceptable, and we as audience become complicit in this intrusive male gaze. I don't think that the sketches he draws are a viable excuse these days. I was left wondering what kind of discussions the male director and female cinematographer (Natasha Braier) had about this at the time, and whether they would see it the same way today. The stalking bit in the middle is explicitly discussed in words, but the gaze isn't. However, it is alluded to in the presence of advertising displays which also appear to take part in the network of gaze connections. A recurring graffity tag reading "je t'aime" also appears to comment on the obsession.

It is a shame, in a way, that the young artist doesn't pay more attention to the lovely city that surrounds him, which also happens to be a model of sustainable transport. We do get to see a lot of the modern tram system (handy device for the cinematographer to reflect or hide people), and there are bikes everywhere. In a very refreshing contrast to most movies, I don't recall seeing any cars in this one. The tumblr where I first saw this movie mentioned is a blog that matches up stills from films with an online map of the locations. Would be fun to revisit Strasbourg and follow the trail of 7 locations listed, without staring too much at all the elusive Sylvias out there.

Still from the stalking sequence, where an ad display looks on. (source)

PS after consulting IMDB on other films shot in Strasbourg, these might be of interest:

Tous les soleils (2011)

Baden Baden (2016)

quite a few films listed in IMDB with Strasbourg as filming location are actually meant to show Paris, including Amelie. Not sure about Truffaut's last one Vivement Dimanche, will have to investigate.