Paris Was a Woman

Paris Was a Woman

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DVD Reviews of Paris Was a Woman

DVD Review: Superb! Brings women artists and their era to life
Summary: 5 Stars

In a mere 75 minutes, with a spellbinding use of archival photos and film footage, Schiller manages to recreate the mood and flavor of this unique community of women who came to The City of Lights (and Love) from the U.S., England, and every corner of the world. This inspired, and moving, film brings to life their passion both for the arts and for a freedom in their personal lives which still resonates today.

We also get to know the less well-known, but no less fascinating, women of this enclave, who gravitated to the famously different salons of Stein (witty and cerebral) and Barney (wild and sensual). The film draws on groundbreaking research, newly-discovered home movies (there is nothing like actually seeing and hearing Gertrude Stein, both in her public and private personas), and intimate storytelling that combines interviews with the people who lived then (Barney's spry housekeeper of 40 years, Berthe Cleyrerque, is unforgettable, as is Janet Flanner) with contemporary scholars (whose brief remarks, sprinkled throughout the film, are illuminating rather than pedantic). Time and again, Schiller and Weiss manage to find exactly the right photos, footage, and sound clips to reveal these women in their complexity as flesh and blood people who in some cases - such as Stein - shaped the course of modern culture.

Paris Was A Woman is not only superb history, it is also inspired filmmaking. Schiller, who edited as well as directed and co-produced, uses the energy of narrative flow, balancing of viewpoints, juxtaposition of the intellectual and revealingly anecdotal, structural use of period music, and delicious humor to bring alive this world in cinematic, and human, terms.

The DVD, from Zeitgeist, includes many excellent supplemental features, including the complete home movies which were excerpted in the film plus additional footage (of Stein, Toklas, Colette, Picasso, Thornton Wilder, poet Paul Valery, and more), two entire sequences cut from the film (one on Stein and Joyce, the other on Hemingway, Stein & Toklas), and dozens of archival photographs (depicting the lives of the women - one memorable split photo shows Colette dressed as a man on one half and as a woman on the other, as well as their paintings, Djuna Barnes's own hand-colored drawings from her 1928 book The Ladies Almanack - which satirized her fellow lesbian literati, and much more).

I highly recommend this exceptional film!

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