Le Paris des mannequins (1962) dir. Franois Reichenbach

A photo shoot on the roofs and in the streets of Paris, under the astonished eyes of the inhabitants. “The gaze is the way to be amazed again,“ says François Reichenbach. A filmmaker of the moment, this intuitive, sometimes instinctive, explains that when you have to prepare a scene to film it, it is already too late. What happens will never happen again, you have to seize the moment. It is spontaneity that interests him: “I only like things that are not prepared, that are done, just like that, in the rush“, he says. François Reichenbach likes to say: “I go where the intensity calls me.“ In Le Paris des mannequins, he films the backstage of a set that is set up in front of his camera’s eye. It is the preparation for a photo shoot in Paris in the early 1960s. A text is placed over the images and Jacques Loussier’s music gives rhythm to the shots of these preparations with syncopated jazz tunes. The team of photographers and models first set up on the floor of the Eiffel Tower, then some of them take up position on the roof of a building in the capital. Finally, the troupe descends into the streets of a Paris with decrepit walls and narrow streets, with small shops that will gradually disappear from the landscape of a France in the throes of urban change