Note: The film starts around the 30 sec­ond mark.

Site of so many his­toric screen­ings, cra­dle of so many inno­v­a­tive auteurs, set­ting of so many mem­o­rable scenes: does any city have a more cen­tral place in the cinephile’s con­scious­ness than Paris? Film­mak­er-pro­fes­sor Richard Mis­ek calls it “the city where cinephil­ia itself began.” It cer­tain­ly has a place in his own cinephilic jour­ney, begin­ning with a chance encounter, 24 years ago in the dis­trict of Mont­martre, with one of the lumi­nar­ies of French New Wave film: Éric Rohmer, who was then in the mid­dle of shoot­ing his pic­ture Ren­dezvous in Paris. “I only real­ized this four­teen years lat­er, when I saw the film late one night on tele­vi­sion,” Mis­ek says. “It was the first Rohmer film I’d ever seen — and I was in it.”

He tells this sto­ry ear­ly in Rohmer in Paris, his hour-long video essay on all the ways the auteur used the city in the course of his pro­lif­ic, more than fifty-year-long film­mak­ing career. Mis­ek describes Rohmer’s char­ac­ters, “always glanc­ing at each oth­er: on trains, on streets, in parks, in the two-way shop win­dows of cafes where they can see and be seen,” as flâneurs, those obser­vant strollers through the city whose type has its ori­gins in the Paris of the 19th cen­tu­ry. “But their walks are restrict­ed to lunch hours and evenings out. They form detours from less leisure­ly tra­jec­to­ries: the lines of a dai­ly com­mute.” With ever-increas­ing rig­or, the direc­tor “traces every step of his char­ac­ters’ jour­neys through the city with topo­graph­ic pre­ci­sion. His char­ac­ters fol­low actu­al paths through Paris, paths that can be drawn as lines on the city’s map.”

Though Rohmer did have his dif­fer­ences, aes­thet­i­cal­ly as well as polit­i­cal­ly, with his col­leagues in the French New Wave, “in one way, at least, he always stayed faith­ful to the spir­it of the nou­velle vague: through­out his life, Rohmer did­n’t just film Paris, he doc­u­ment­ed it.” Cut­ting up and delib­er­ate­ly re-arrang­ing thou­sands of pieces of image and sound in Rohmer’s dozens of shorts and fea­tures, plac­ing side-by-side shots of the same Parisian spaces years and even decades apart, Mis­ek shows us how Rohmer cin­e­mat­i­cal­ly illus­trates “one of the basic truths about urban exis­tence: in cities, humans’ lives inter­sect every day. But most of these inter­sec­tions are tran­si­to­ry, crossed paths between two peo­ple fol­low­ing dif­fer­ent tra­jec­to­ries.”

Rohmer did­n’t always film in Paris. As his career went on, he told more sto­ries that depart from the city, but then, those sto­ries also usu­al­ly return to it: ulti­mate­ly, almost all of his char­ac­ters find that “Paris can­not be tran­scend­ed.” Watch just one of Rohmer’s films, and you’ll see how lit­tle inter­est he has in roman­ti­ciz­ing the City of Light, yet the words of one char­ac­ter in Full Moon in Paris might also be his own: “The air is foul, but I can breathe,” he declares. “I need to be at the cen­ter, in the cen­ter of a coun­try, in a city cen­ter that’s almost the cen­ter of the world.”

Just as Rohmer demon­strates the inex­haustibil­i­ty of Paris with his fil­mog­ra­phy, Mis­ek demon­strates the inex­haustibil­i­ty of that fil­mog­ra­phy with Rohmer in Paris, which he has recent­ly released into the pub­lic domain and made free to watch online. It pro­vides real insight into the work of Éric Rohmer, the city in which he became a cinephile and then a film­mak­er, and how the two repeat­ed­ly inter­sect with one anoth­er over the sec­ond half of the 20th cen­tu­ry and the begin­ning of the 21st. But it also implies an answer, in the affir­ma­tive, to anoth­er, more gen­er­al propo­si­tion that Mis­ek rais­es ear­ly in the essay: “I can’t help but won­der if cinephil­ia is a jour­ney with­out end.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Tui­leries: The Coen Broth­ers’ Short Film About Steve Buscemi’s Very Bad Day in the Paris Metro

The City in Cin­e­ma Mini-Doc­u­men­taries Reveal the Los Ange­les of Blade Run­ner, Her, Dri­ve, Repo Man, and More

Port­land, the City in Cin­e­ma: See the City of Ros­es as it Appears in 20 Dif­fer­ent Films

Van­cou­ver Nev­er Plays Itself

How the French New Wave Changed Cin­e­ma: A Video Intro­duc­tion to the Films of Godard, Truf­faut & Their Fel­low Rule-Break­ers

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

The strug­gles of First Nations peo­ples in Cana­da have loomed large in the news, show­ing a far harsh­er side of a coun­try Amer­i­cans tend to car­i­ca­ture as a land of bland nice­ness, hock­ey fan­dom, and social­ized med­i­cine. Huge num­bers of miss­ing and mur­dered indige­nous women, high rates of sui­cide, a mul­ti­tude of health crises, and—as in the U.S.—the ongo­ing encroach­ment onto Indige­nous lands by tox­ic pipelines and oil­sands devel­op­ment…..

As with issues affect­ing oth­er belea­guered com­mu­ni­ties across the globe, suf­fer­ing from the con­tin­ued depre­da­tions of colo­nial­ism and cap­i­tal­ism, these prob­lems can seem so over­whelm­ing that we don’t know how to begin to under­stand them. As always, the arts offer a way in—through human­iz­ing por­traits and inti­mate rev­e­la­tions, through detailed and com­pas­sion­ate sto­ries, through cre­ativ­i­ty, humor, and beau­ty.

In March of this year, the Nation­al Film Board of Cana­da launched an “exten­sive online library of over 200 films by Indige­nous direc­tors,” reports the CBC, “part of a three-year Indige­nous Action Plan to ‘rede­fine’ the NFB’s rela­tion­ship with Indige­nous peo­ples.” You can read the NFB’s plan here, a response to “the work and rec­om­men­da­tions of the Truth and Rec­on­cil­i­a­tion Com­mis­sion of Cana­da.”

Their free online film col­lec­tion is search­able by sub­ject, direc­tor, or Indige­nous peo­ple or nation, writes Native News Online, and “many of the films in this col­lec­tion are cur­rent­ly being screened in com­mu­ni­ties right across Cana­da as part of the #Aabizi­ing­washi (#WideAwake) Indige­nous cin­e­ma screen­ing series.”

Some of the high­lights of the col­lec­tion include Ala­nis Obomsawin’s The Peo­ple of the Kat­tawapiskak Riv­er (top), a 2012 doc­u­men­tary that Judith Schuyler, of the Toron­to-based Imag­i­ne­NA­TIVE film orga­ni­za­tion, describes as “high­light­ing the gov­ern­ment, the dia­mond mines and the sky­rock­et­ing freight costs as the con­tribut­ing fac­tors keep­ing the [Kat­tawapiskak] com­mu­ni­ty in impov­er­ished third world con­di­tions.” Below it, see Lumaa­ju­uq, a beau­ti­ful­ly-ani­mat­ed short 2010 film by Alethea Arnaquq-Bar­il that tells the Inu­it sto­ry of “The Blind Man and the Loon.”

Fur­ther up, see First Stories—Two Spir­it­ed, a 2007 film by Sharon A. Des­jar­lais that film­mak­er Bret­ten Han­nam describes as “a mes­sage of hope and heal­ing not only for two-spir­it peo­ple, but for all indige­nous peo­ple,” and, just above, Den­nis Allen’s CBQM, a doc­u­men­tary about a radio sta­tion in Fort McPher­son, North­west Ter­ri­to­ries, which ImagineNative’s Jason Ryle describes as “a ten­der, inti­mate por­trait of a north­ern com­mu­ni­ty.”

Native News Online and the CBC list sev­er­al oth­er rec­om­men­da­tions from the col­lec­tion, or you can sim­ply dive in and start watch­ing here. Also, check out this crash course on ris­ing Indige­nous film­mak­ers. And if at any point you feel inspired to don the garb of a First Nations peo­ple and hit the clubs or music fes­ti­vals, well, maybe heed the ultra-short pub­lic ser­vice announce­ment, “Naked Island—Hipster Head­dress,” below, and “Just Don’t Do It.”

via @sheerly

Relat­ed Con­tent:

265 Free Doc­u­men­taries Online 

1,150 Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, etc. 

An Archive of 20,000 Movie Posters from Czecho­slo­va­kia (1930–1989)

Mar­tin Scors­ese Cre­ate a List of 38 Essen­tial Films About Amer­i­can Democ­ra­cy

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness