Fotos de André Zucca
Gianfranco Ferré, spring 2009: olha só o salto da sandália se não é idêntico ao de 1940s - o mesmo que Marc Jacobs resgatou há umas quatro coleções na Louis Vuitton?
Há muitos meses, minha irmã me mandou essas fotos de um expo polêmica em Paris: a cidade luz durante a ocupação nazista.
Incomoda porque são cenas do cotidiano. As mulheres bem vestidas, com jóias, se maquiando - a moda como sentido de alienação ou de futilidade. Não há nada, a não ser algumas fotos coloridas entre as 270 exibidas de soldados alemães desfilando pela Rue de Rivoli, que indique sofrimento. Ou a Guerra 2.
Eu resgatei duas matérias sobre o tema da expo/da ocupação. O período é um tabu na França. Quem estuda WW2 sabe que hoje, entre os franceses, ninguém era colaboracionista.
A primeira, publicada pelo International Herald Tribune, fala da expo em si e da polêmica das fotos de André Zucca, feitas para uma revista de propaganda nazi, a
Signal.
A segunda, do Sunday Times, aponta para um livro que trata das mulheres - e do comportamento erótico - na época. “It is a taboo subject, a story nobody wants to hear,” said Patrick Buisson, author of
1940-1945 Années Erotiques (“erotic years”). “It may hurt our national pride, but the reality is that people adapted to occupation.”
O que me causa admiração são os sapatos. Ou o peso eles. Sei das invencionices de Salvatore Ferragamo (salto de cortiça, sandália invisível - com fios de nylon) por falta de material clássico para a confecção dos pisantes. Mas esses dois exemplares poderiam estar em qualquer das passarelas das últimas temporadas em que statement shoes vêm pisoteando as maxi ou IT bags.
Ontem, lendo a Bazaar USA de setembro 2008, encontrei um trecho que poderia be servir para explicar os sapatos pesados dos anos 1940.
"Shoes have become the key to the new looks as a way of grounding fluidity or giving lift to the sober tailoring." (fluidez e alfaiataria austera em sendo as modas da década de 1940 tbm)
Louis Vuitton, fall 2008
Marni, fall 2008
Prada, fall 2008
Como hoje, os sapatos aterram nossos pés no chão, dão a sensação de controle, presença e poder em tempos difíceis. Também dão poder erótico às mulheres, força mesmo. E, ao contrário da alienação, são, junto com outras preocupações estéticas no meio do caos, uma teimosia de sucumbir, um jeito de resistir, um gesto de sobrevivência.
Diz Buisson, autor do livro: “People needed to prove that they were alive. They did so by making love.” Ou usando sapatos pesados. Ou se maquiando. Ou penteando os cabelos à moda zazoo.
Mesmo entre os sobreviventes que reclamaram da premissa de Buisson há reconhecimento do gesto de sobrevivência:
People who lived through the occupation found it insulting to suggest that they spent it in bed. “It makes me really angry,” said Liliane Schroeder, 88, who risked her life as a member of the resistance and has published her own journal of the occupation. “It’s shocking and ridiculous to say life was just a big party,” she told The Sunday Times. “We had much better things to do.”
Schroeder nevertheless described her life as a messenger in the resistance as a
“marvellous time” in which “people got on with life even if they weren’t laughing”. Young women were useful to the resistance, she said, because “when a young woman and a man sat in a café it did not look as if they were plotting. They looked like lovers”.
A vida seguiu/segue, diz Liliane Schroeder. E nos melhores sapatos.
No International Herald Tribune
Photo exhibit shows Paris under Nazi occupation, minus the misery
By Meg Bortin
Friday, April 25, 2008
PARIS: April in Paris. Nazis in uniform. Holiday tables under the trees.
That something is wrong with the old refrain has not escaped the notice of the crowds flocking this April - with chestnut trees in blossom at last - to a photo exhibition so controversial that the Paris mayor's top aide for cultural affairs publicly urged him to shut it down.
The exhibition, "The Parisians Under the Occupation," puts on view 270 color photographs of daily life in the French capital during World War II. These photos have never been displayed before, giving visitors a rare opportunity to see images of Paris during the 1940-44 Nazi occupation.
The fact that the photographer, André Zucca, shot the pictures while working for Signal, a Nazi propaganda magazine, is not the main source of the dispute. Rather, it is that the pictures went up with no historical information to put them in context - as though all Parisians enjoyed days in the park and promenades down broad leafy avenues, when in fact thousands, mainly Jews, were being deported to Nazi extermination camps.
The images on display are indeed striking: Three smiling young women in white-rimmed sunglasses pose in the Luxembourg Gardens in May 1942; well-dressed couples relax at outdoor café tables at Fouquets, on the Champs-Elysées, as two uniformed German officers stroll by; an elegant woman in fur and jewels shares luscious-looking cherries with a well-heeled man on a park bench, their baby beside them in a pram.
The captions, however, give little more than the place and date, if that.
Controversy about the exhibit began building shortly after it went up in mid-March at an annex to the Paris Historical Library, in the Marais district, and escalated sharply last weekend, when Mayor Bertrand Delanoë's chief aide for culture, Christophe Girard, told Le Journal du Dimanche, a leading Sunday newspaper, that when he first saw the display it made him want to vomit.
Girard ordered posters around Paris advertising the exhibition to be taken down, while Delanoë - no stranger to controversy - went into damage control. He acknowledged at a media lunch that the way the exhibition had been organized left plenty to be desired but said it would stay up, declaring that he did not wish to add "a wrong" - censorship - to the errors already committed. He added that debates about the photos would be organized.
Even before Delanoë spoke out, organizers of the exhibition began making small changes after complaints from historians, visitors and groups like the French Human Rights League. On April 2, a panel headlined "Warning" went up, and a few days later leaflets reprinting the warning began being handed to visitors as they entered.
The leaflet describes the photos as exceptional: "The only color pictures taken in occupied Paris by a French photographer" who was not only accredited but also used German Agfacolor film - "almost impossible to get hold of at the time."
It adds:
"What André Zucca portrays for us is a casual, even carefree Paris. He has opted for a vision that does not show - or hardly shows - the reality of occupation and its tragic aspects: waiting lines in front of food shops, rounding up of Jews, posters announcing executions."Colombe Brossel, Delanoë's chief aide for patrimony, said in a telephone interview Friday that captions going up next week would improve on ones like, "Keeping Up With Fashion," the current bright description of the three bespectacled young women in the Luxembourg Gardens in 1942.
Visitors on a recent day pressed into the basement exhibition space as soon as the doors opened. Some were curious to see how familiar spots in Paris had looked during the war: the big Marignan cinema on the Champs-Elysées renamed as the Soldatenkino (Soldiers' Cinema); the flower beds of the Luxembourg Gardens planted with onions and radishes; a man on a tandem "taxi" waiting near the Madeleine church.
Zucca also photographed scenes that made it clear there was a war on: helmeted Nazis marching though Paris, a car festooned with the American, British and Soviet flags during the Liberation. But most show ordinary people: a blonde woman bicycling on a sunny Sunday; a street acrobat; travelers leaving a railway station.
"You can't really feel that it's the Occupation," said Serge Thilloux, 70, who was visiting from Le Mans. "You have the impression that people can walk about freely, while today there are plaques around Paris indicating where this or that person was shot." He said photos showing the darker reality of Paris in the war years should have been included.
Robert Schenker, 66, was visiting from Zurich. "It shows how frighteningly normal life was," he said. "With the exception of the Germans in uniform, you can hardly see any difference from daily life now."
Jean-Pierre Azéma, a historian who has written about Zucca, told the newspaper Le Monde that, among other problems, the exhibition had the wrong title. It "should have been 'Some' Parisians Under the Occupation," he said, "and not 'The' Parisians."
mais duas, de curiosidade:
Keeping up with fashion, nos jardins de Luxemburgo, 1942: o título da foto causou enjôo.
No Sunday Times
May 25, 2008
Paris during Nazi occupation was ‘one big romp’Matthew Campbell in Paris
A new book which suggests that the German occupation of France encouraged the sexual liberation of women has shocked a country still struggling to come to terms with its troubled history of collaboration with the Nazis.
Like a recent photographic exhibition showing Parisians enjoying themselves under the occupation, the book’s depiction of life in Paris as one big party is at odds with the collective memory of hunger, resistance and fear.
“It is a taboo subject, a story nobody wants to hear,” said Patrick Buisson, author of 1940-1945 Années Erotiques (“erotic years”). “It may hurt our national pride, but the reality is that people adapted to occupation.”Many might prefer to forget but, with their husbands in prison camps, numerous women slept not only with German soldiers – the young “blond barbarians” were particularly attractive to French women, says Buisson – but also conducted affairs with anyone else who could help them through financially difficult times: “They gave way to the advances of the boss, to the tradesman they owed money to, their neighbour. In times of rationing, the body is the only renewable, inexhaustible currency.”
Cold winters, when coal was in short supply, and a curfew from 11pm to 5am also encouraged sexual activity, says Buisson, with the result that the birth rate shot up in 1942 even though 2m men were locked up in the camps.
The book has stirred painful memories. One French reviewer called it “impertinent” and another accused Buisson of telling only part of the story by focusing on the “beneath the belt” history of the occupation.
Le Monde, the bible of the French intellectual elite, chided the author, who is the director of French television’s History Channel, for painting life under the occupation as a “gigantic orgy”.
People who lived through the occupation found it insulting to suggest that they spent it in bed. “It makes me really angry,” said Liliane Schroeder, 88, who risked her life as a member of the resistance and has published her own journal of the occupation. “It’s shocking and ridiculous to say life was just a big party,” she told The Sunday Times. “We had much better things to do.”
Schroeder nevertheless described her life as a messenger in the resistance as a “marvellous time” in which “people got on with life even if they weren’t laughing”. Young women were useful to the resistance, she said, because “when a young woman and a man sat in a café it did not look as if they were plotting. They looked like lovers”.French sensitivities about the country’s wartime record were demonstrated last month when an exhibition of photographs depicting Parisians enjoying life under the Nazis included a notice explaining that the pictures avoided the “reality of occupation and its tragic aspects”. The photographs showed well-dressed citizens shopping on the boulevards or strolling in the parks. People crowded into nightclubs. Women in bikinis swam in a pool.
Buisson dedicates a chapter in his book to cinemas, which he describes as hotbeds of erotic activity, particularly when it was cold outside. “At a few francs they were cheaper than a hotel room,” he writes, “and, offering the double cover of darkness and anonymity, propitious for all sorts of outpourings.”
The French even had sex in the catacombs, the underground ossuary and warren of subterranean tunnels in Paris: war, Buisson argues, acted as an aphrodisiac, stimulating “the survival instinct”. He said in an interview: “People needed to prove that they were alive. They did so by making love.”
It has been claimed that prostitutes staged the first rebellion against the Nazis by refusing to service the invaders but Buisson called this a myth. The Germans, he claimed, were welcomed into the city’s best brothels, a third of which were reserved for officers. Another 100,000 women in Paris became “occasional prostitutes”, he said.
Elsewhere, members of the artistic elite drowned their sorrows in debauchery. Simone de Beauvoir, the writer, and Jean-Paul Sartre, the philosopher, were devotees of allnight parties fuelled by alcohol and lust.
“It was only in the course of those nights that I discovered the true meaning of the word party,” was how de Beauvoir put it. Sartre was no less enthusiastic: “Never were we as free as under the German occupation.”
De Beauvoir wrote about the “quite spontaneous friendliness” of the conquerors: she was as fascinated as any by the German “cult of the body” and their penchant for exercising in nothing but gym shorts.
“In the summer of 1940,” wrote Buisson, “France was transformed into one big naturist camp. The Germans seemed to have gathered on French territory only to celebrate an impressive festival of gymnastics.” The author said he did not want to make light of a tragic part of French history, but there was a need to correct the “mythical” image of the occupation. “In this horrible period, life continued,” he said.
“It is disturbing to know that while the Jews were being deported, the French were making love. But that is the truth.”
Now Buisson is at work on a sequel, about how women were punished for sleeping with the enemy. The provisional title is Revenge of the Males.
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