SWINGING BELLEVILLE RENDEZ-VOUS

par Alain Delaunois

August 26, 2019

Ivan ALECHINE et Pierre ALECHINSKY, Belleville sur un nuage, Yellow Now, collection, Les carnets, 114 p., 14 euros. ISBN : 9 782 873 404 451

On the cover photo, a battered four-door Pontiac Parisienne, late 1950s model, exhibits its ship-like bodywork, badly damaged on the front-rear fenders. An equally dilapidated building, with windows walled up with concrete, holds on as best it can in the background. We don't see the word "Hotel," but the rest of the lettering gives its name: "de l'Avenir." Obviously, it didn't work out too well for it. But it's not just this building or the heavy American car that have taken a hit. In the mid-1960s, the entire upper Belleville neighborhood, in the 20th arrondissement of Paris, was between two waters: a long urban renovation had begun with the demolition of abandoned or unsanitary blocks, but a large part of the neighborhood was still made up of housing with hardly expensive rents, shaky shacks, small streets, dead ends, courtyards and small courtyards, small gardens nested within each other. "Paris was still provincial, warm and gentle," writes Ivan Alechine, who spent his childhood there. "Small businesses, popular craftsmanship nourished us, a certain idea of mutual aid between people of the same street still existed. There were bridges between the past and the present. We had our feet in the 19th century, our noses in the wind of the 20th."

Belleville sur un nuage, the precious little book by Ivan Alechine and Pierre Alechinsky published in "Les carnets," the tonic collection of photographic archives from Yellow Now editions, is looked at and read like an album of yesteryear. Between individual stories and socio-geographical capture of a neighborhood now completely transformed, photographs and texts battle against memory loss and oblivion. From 1955 to 1964, the date of their move to Bougival, young Ivan, his parents, Pierre and Micky Alechinsky, the youngest brother, Nicolas, will occupy a ground floor with a garden view, in one of these houses that make up the Villa Ottoz, at 43 rue Piat.

Friends, like jazz bassist Benoit Quersin, then novelist Christiane Rochefort, are installed in different parts of the house, others are regular visitors, trumpeter Chet Baker or Christian Dotremont. "A camp bed remained set up for him in the kitchen," specifies Alechinsky. Childhood emotions, free conversations of adults, urban wanderings, atmospheres of a neighborhood that Alechine could not have forgotten – and of which cinema has kept traces: Cocteau comes in 1950 to film Jean Marais and Maria Casares in Orphée, Jacques Becker shoots Casque d'or with Signoret and Reggiani a year later, and Truffaut plants some images of Jules et Jim at Villa Ortiz in 1961.

Young Ivan does not approach adolescence or adulthood easily, he notably evoked this in a previous book, Oldies (Galilée, 2012). To get him out of his boredom, his father takes him one day to their old Belleville neighborhood. Father and son, each with a Leica in hand, revisit the streets. A founding walk, assures the writer and photographer that Ivan Alechine has become. There is therefore something of the "coming-of-age novel" in this walk in Belleville, as shown by the images published today, side by side, by Alechinsky and Alechine. It's 1966, the teenager still follows his father, listens to what is taught to him, but sometimes frames a little crooked. This first roll of film, however, will not be lost.

In the years that follow, Alechine returns alone to Belleville. He captures the increasingly tired buildings, the cracked houses, the storefronts with lowered shutters, then walled up, the shop lettering in the process of progressive erasure: "Bois et Charbons," "Soins de beauté," "Cherie la Semeuse" (for Boucherie de la Semeuse), "Au Point du jour," "La Treille de Belleville"... He wanders, finds the atmospheres of yesteryear, discovers others, which, later, will truly reveal themselves to him. Thus, a "Coiffure Dames" salon at 24 rue Vilin... Banal, nothing particular. But it's 1969. That year, Georges Perec undertook a systematic exploration of the neighborhood of his early years, notably to write his book W ou le Souvenir d'enfance. Perec lived at 24, where his mother ran this hair salon, before being deported to Auschwitz in 1943.

The immediate surroundings of Villa Ottoz, a wasteland on rue de la Montagne – where an old apartment building and a newly built HLM tower coexist –, a footbridge connecting two streets... So many signs that announce the overlapping of eras, and the difficult transitions, for merchants as well as for the inhabitants of the area. And for Alechine, finding these printed images of the Belleville of yesteryear today is, without black melancholy, to watch again for the appearance "of the white cloud on which we had lived."