The success of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games (OG) owes much to the capital city's exceptional backdrops. After years of terrorist attacks, Covid-19 and a non-stop series of construction sites, the combination of the breathtaking opening and closing ceremonies, the athletes' bodies spiraling through the air and this backdrop of freshly polished monuments immediately restored the city's reputation. Yet the Paris over which the Olympic flame rose bore little resemblance to the one built for the Games.
The housing of the Olympic village, the Arena Porte de La Chapelle, the Olympic aquatic center, the renovated sports facilities – all these works produced in record time for the event remained largely off-screen. Generally speaking, the images around which the nation seemed to gather after the traumatic dissolution of the Assemblée Nationale (lower house of French parliament) were totally disconnected from the city encountered by Parisians on a daily basis. Produced by the Olympic Broadcasting Service, the audiovisual arm of the International Olympic Committee, these images were deliberately conceived as a phantasmagoria – a cross between a Disney fairy tale, a National Geographic documentary and a Louis Vuitton advertisement.
Monopoly board
As the event's premium partner, the LVMH group imposed unprecedented clauses that resulted in insertion of a parallel montage of the work of the French luggage-maker's craftsmen and that of restoration experts working on Notre-Dame cathedral, in the first hour of the opening ceremony broadcast. Production of LVMH's identifiable checkerboard-patterned carrying cases for the torch and the Olympic medals – broadcast on television from morning to night – was also part of this negotiation.
The city of golden reflections, which amazed the world all summer, was the one claimed by the giants of luxury and real estate. The Paris built up around a disputed Monopoly board, on the other hand, is sorely lacking in image. In his essay Paris n'est Plus une Fête ("The Party is Over for Paris," Les Voix Urbaines, 168 pages, €18), Hacène Belmessous traced the origins of the "financialized," "socially homogenized" and "increasingly artificial" Paris back to the city's unsuccessful bid for the 2012 Olympics, and the resulting desire to compete for the world's private capital. It's not yet a clear representation.
In the cinema, Paris is often reduced to a handful of symbols that conjure up the constant image of an unchanging city – even when Paris is the subject of the film. Revoir Paris (Paris Memories, 2022), by Alice Winocourt, takes place in a perfectly Haussmannian (19th century Parisian architectural style) setting, illuminated by the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe, where signs of the contemporary world have been discreetly melted into an artistic blur. This is the Paris of the film's heroine, a translator married to a surgeon who survives a terrorist attack. The trauma she experienced leads her on a quest to find herself, a quest which takes the form of opening up to others. The film then shifts to the Porte de La Chapelle area, where, in contrast, kebab shops, migrant hostels and open-air construction sites stand out as absolute strangeness.
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