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Nuit Blanche 2011: Live coverage

Image: Nuit Blanche

 

Your Vingt Paris writers will be wandering around Paris all night, tweeting what tickles their fancy and what doesn't. Let us know what you're doing too. #VPNB11

 

Hugo Pratt At The Pinacothèque

Image: France 2
Text: Elliot Elam

For a 124-year-old son of a prostitute witch who bowed out of public life two decades ago, it must be said that Corto Maltese is looking pretty good. His handsome features remain rugged, a cigarette still hangs from his lip, and that white sailor’s cap of his hasn’t dulled at all. There’s no reason not to swoon.
 
The only difference is that, this time, he’s not in the comics. Instead, he’s up on the walls of the Pinacothèque de Paris – as part of a vast retrospective of work by Italian bande dessinée artist, Hugo Pratt.
 
Pratt died in 1995, six years after his last Corto Maltese story was published. It ended a series so full of thrills and spills Baron Münchhausen would have been hard-pressed to keep up: Born without a ‘fate line’ on his palm, Pratt had the young Maltese take a razor and slice his own, before carving out a life of swashbuckling adventure that took in pirates, Fascists, the October Revolution and Rasputin, occult trip-outs at Stonehenge, lost continents and much, much more. Maltese stayed coolly on the side of good throughout, even as raven-haired women attempted seduction and men threw daggers into the wall behind his head.

Jossot's Lessons From The Past

Text: Elliot Elam
Image: Le président s’adressant au principal accusé lui dit, 1905

Liberté, egalité, fraternité: it's a phrase that may trip off the tongue. But in France votes are still cast in their thousands for far right parties, the UN recently noted a "resurgence in racism and xenophobia", and the country’s Interior Minister was fined for racist comments before, only last month, being quietly dropped from government altogether. Moreover, in line with much of the rest of the world, many parts of France have cast Islam as a modern day bogeyman; strange, savage and something to be feared.
 
All of which provides an interesting context in which to visit an exhibition of work by the political caricaturist Jossot. Taking place at the Bibliothèque Forney until June 18, it’s a chance to see a retrospective of work by one of the Belle Epoque’s most acidic critics.

The Cannes Of Comics

Text: Elliot Elam
Image: Baru

Back in the 16th Century, at the end of the war with Spain, French soldiers returned home rolling their own cigarettes. This habitude espagnol took root and, in a small town near Bordeaux, a young paper-maker saw his chance. Taking the second part of his name as inspiration and as quick as you can say "a packet of the blue ones, please", Alexandro Rizlette de Cramptone Lacroix created what is perhaps the world’s most famous rolling paper.
 
Rizla remains Angoulême’s most famous export, but this south-western town is pretty famous for marks made on paper too. For over thirty years it has played host to Le Festival International de la Bande Dessinée d'Angoulême, Europe’s largest comics festival. And as you may well know, Europe takes its comics very seriously.
 
Every January, for four days, almost a quarter of a million people descend for this "Cannes of BD", stretching their eyes to accommodate a wealth of ink, line and speech balloons. The culmination of the event is to see which of the world’s greatest BD artists be awarded with the festival’s Grand Prix in recognition of their work and their contribution to the evolution of comics. ­­

Moebius - Transe Forme

Text: Elliot Elam
Image: "La Chasse au Major", 2009, Acrylic on canvas.

Even back in the late fifties, Jean Giraud was going places. Drawing professionally since his teens, he’d been receiving plaudits (and even work) from great bande dessinée artists like Jijé and Jean-Claude Mézières. He’d even been published in the Journal de Spirou, the Belgian comics weekly that was also home to Tintin, before he turned twenty.

But as much as he enjoyed drawing the teenage heroines, or the ‘Let’s Look At History’ strips, he needed an outlet for the other more curlicued corners of his imagination. The science fiction stuff, the fantasy stuff, the erotic stuff. How would he find it?

The answer, in part, came with a new name. Moebius - a one-sided strip of material that, since the 19th century, mathematicians had been flipping this way and that in an attempt to understand the finer points of algebra. So Giraud slipped on this pseudonym, and in 1963 (still aged only 25) he contributed a number of short stories to the French satirical magazine Hara-Kiri. In each panel Moebius began to unfurl a beautiful, organic style of drawing that seemed to leap from blank-faced simplicity to Doré-esque detail with just a flick of his nib.

l'Impossible Photographie at Musée Carnavalet

Text: Brendan Seibel
Photo: Medical Visit at the Saint-Lazare Prison, Henri Manuel

Prisons remain a hidden world, an entire society locked away and shrouded in secrecy. Film and television exploit the visual cliches of incarceration for entertainment of a fascinated public. l'Impossible Photographie the historical overview which attempts to peel back the bars and walls and reveal the complexities of a frequently feared and misrepresented system. Collecting 340 photographs from over 150 years, this exhibition is overtly visual. Ranging from early sepia-tinted exteriors to vibrant full-color prints, you immediately become immersed in the legacy of guards and convicts, nuns and administrators.

The astonishing archive of Henri Manuel, employed by the French government for several decades, provides invaluable insight. Moving freely through the various corridors and courtyards of Parisian prisons Manuel explores the open wards, confining cells, workshops and infirmaries with a documentarian's eye. Cinematic and emotional, Pierre Emonts provides the most striking early interiors. The best exterior shots, providing the appropriate context of these houses of incarceration as well as tracing the architectural development over time, were taken by Charles Marville, who had previously documented the changes wrought by Haussmann.

Crumb and Sempé at Angoulême 2010

The 37th edition of the famous festival of comic books, which takes place from January 28 to 31, 2010 in Angoulême will host a meeting with two phenomenal artists, Jean-Jacques Sempé and Robert Crumb. Jean-Jacques Sempé, who recently published the magnificent Sempé à New York on the cover of The New Yorker, will present on January 28, 2010 at 3pm. Robert Crumb, an American artist and illustrator, will host a debate with other guests on January 30, 2010 at noon. Spirou, perhaps the most famous magazine of bande dessinée in France, will prepare a special edition at the occasion of the festival at Angoulême.

International Festival of Comic Books at Angoulême

71 rue Hergé
16000 Angoulême

Le Louvre invite la bande dessinée

Adrian K. Sanders writing for I V Y paris

Since 2005, the Louvre has worked in conjunction with BD editor and publisher Futuropolis to showcase a work of bande dessinee that directly contends with the history of the Louvre.

This year's selection Le Ciel au-dessus du Louvre by Bernar Yslaire and Jean-Claude Carrière was created completely on computers (much to the horror of the elitist BD masses) and will be displayed exclusively on two large LCD screens.

Though there isn't much impetus for one to close up the old laptop and trek all the way to the Louvre just to see something on an LCD screen, big fans of Futuropolis will be happy to know that both Nicolas de Crécy and Éric Liberge will be doing a signing at the Carousel du Louvre this Friday.

Feeble attempts at embracing technology aside, the Louvre's BD support is welcomed. And for those who aren't too familiar with bande dessinee, this is a great exposition just to see up close how time consuming and maddening the cartoonist's job really is... even with the help of Adobe Illustrator.

Le Louvre invite la bande dessinée with Futuropolis
Now through April 13, 2009

The Official Angoulême International Comics Festival Selection

Adrian Sanders writing for I V Y paris

Down south and west of Paris in Angoulême, the comics festival is almost ready to kick off. This year's official selection is solid, though maybe not earth shattering - with standard fare from American regulars (James Kochalka and Adrian Tomine) as well as the French (Emmanuel Gibert, Christophe Blain) and the ever present British contribution of Posy Simmonds.

The three that stick out:

Newcomer Dash Shaw's Bottomless Belly Button is a work of real merit, combining the best of family drama with distorted narrative tricks, and some serious physical heft (720 pages). No wonder it took two whole years to complete.

Gally's Mon gras et moi is funny, honest, sad, humiliating, and the closest thing you'll get to a publicly accepted feminist work in France. It's not Fun Home, but neither is anything else.

Blutch's Le petit Christian, tome 2 is the last straw. The guy is horrendously underrated, not only as a fantastic cartoonist that seemingly changes styles perfectly at whim, but also with this quasi-autobiographical work, a competent storyteller.

The whole list is viewable after the break.

Sélection ACBD Prix de la Critique 2009

Over at Le briographe, Jérôme Briot has posted the official selection of BD's according to the Association des Critiques et journalistes de Bande Dessinée (ACBD). It's a decidedly sober affair, with the exception of the classic re-release of Emile Bravo's Spirou (featured left), and Jean-Yves Ferri's De Gaulle à la plage.

The addition of Posy Simmonds' Tamara Drewe is a welcome acknowledgement that BD can and is created by members of the English speaking world.

The rest of them are fine and dandy, a smattering of World War stories (Il etait une fois en France, La guerre d'Alan), suspense (Shutter Island), history (Château l'Attente), etcetera etcetera.

The sum of this year according to the ACBD appears to be that nothing ever changes in French BD, and that it's best to just pick the best of each clearly defined and eternally redone genre. Genre!

The official "best of selection" will be announced on the 30th. I await with baited breath.