Paris Was a Woman

This movie is great - a documentary about women in early 1900s Paris - Stein, Beach, Monnier, Colette, Barney... omg I'm swooning. How they were all reading "Songs of Bilitis" - omg damn!

am remembering bitterly the prof, Virginia something orother, at U.Tx who gave me a shitty grade b/c i kept saying and writing that there were women poets and painters in paris at that time. and she there weren't or that if there were a few they were unimportant and freaks. in a class called painters and poets in 1920s paris. no women studied in that class. taught by a woman.

more later. must watch, i can't understand the french really without looking

***

Berenice Abbott, Gisele Freund, Djuna Barnes, Natalie Barney, Sylvia Beach, Adrienne Monnier, Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Colette, Janet Flanner, painter Marie Laurencin

(and Matisse, Picasso, Hemingway, and James Joyce)
janet - "Genet" in the New Yorker for 40 years
eiline grey
Ada "Bricktop " Smith -
lee mayer
josephine baker
h.d. came every single day - to the bookshop
paul valery
Natalie barney "L'Amazone" fri. afternoon salon - american heiress
renee vivian - opera , louys!!! biliitis! yeah!!!!
Romaine Brooks

book of photos or an exhibition by gisele freund with photos of like, every dude in paris, plus: marie bonaparte, elizabeth bowen, victoria ocampo, vita sackville-west, virginia woolf, bryher

yeah Bryher!! yeah ocampo!

stein on living in france - "they are living their lives. so your life can belong to you." this made me think of what a friend of mine said about going to europe and realizing that this whole channel in his brain just stopped... the awareness of specific american racism against black men... that voice stopped talking and he was able to be, without it. (part of that cultural but part being about not knowing the language so well)

Comments

[laura Q]

so glad you're seeing this! i saw it in chicago when it came out, probably at the art institute theater ...? but greta schiller was there for Q&A. (or, so i remember ... that was ten years ago!) really awesome. and it's on DVD now which rocks! weren't we just talking about this? really, one of my favorite documentaries.

[badgerbag]

yes... you told me that I *must* see it and I emailed Rook instantly to ask him to put it on our netflix queue. I was complaining last night it could have been about 4 hours longer and included way more women... WAY more. there was only a passing glimpse of Victoria Ocampo's name but she was only one of a gazillion latin american women who were in paris at the time and who were artists/writers/poets etc. Not to mention barely mentioning h.d. and bryher and all of that crowd.

dude i love the photos where they are all in tunics and 8 tons of eyeliner dancing around like fools in someone's garden around a greek column, looking like the hugest lesbians.