Paris Was a Woman

Paris in the '20s was a lodestone not just for Hemingway, Joyce and Dos Passos, among other male heavyweight novelists: Paris Was a Woman would have us--to quote Abigail Adams--"remember the ladies." Gretta Schiller's film focuses on a group of Left Bank female regulars, including authors Colette, Djuna Barnes, and Gertrude Stein (as well as her noted companion Alice B. Toklas), the painter Romaine Brooks, photographer Gisele Freund, booksellers Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier, and journalist Janet Flanner. Combining archival footage and stills and contemporary interviews with scholars and contemporaries, the film offers an impressionistic (at best) overview of the artists and the times, occasionally relating interesting anecdotes (such as James Joyce's shoddy treatment of Sylvia Beach, who went bankrupt publishing Ulysses; or an illuminating discussion of Stein's work--much of which was out-of-print until the very recent 2-vol. Library of America edition of her writings). Far too much of the documentary, however, seems to be merely a rote exercise in name dropping. Watching archival interview footage of Sylvia Beach waxing rhapsodic on everyone she ever met is a bit like listening to an obsessive Anglophile nattering on about the Royal family tree. Serious literary criticism students may want to try this, but--like I said--this is more a list of people at the living-in-exile party than a serious examination of the feminine artistic milieu of Paris in the '20s. Optional. (R. Pitman)[DVD Review--July 15, 2003--Zeitgeist, 75 min., not rated, $29.99--Recently released to coincide with Gay Pride Month, Paris Was a Woman looks and sounds reasonably sharp on DVD, and boasts nine minutes worth of home movie footage of Stein, Toklas, Thornton Wilder, and Picasso (among others), as well as five minutes worth of deleted scenes concerning 1) Ernest Hemingway's hot/cold friendship with Stein (although the suggestion here that Hemingway was sexually attracted to Stein is unsubstantiated) and 2), the somewhat overstated assertion that Stein was more of a literary experimenter than James Joyce. In addition, the disc includes a photo gallery and a trailer for the film Aimee & Jaguar. Also newly available: a special edition of the 1993 documentary Daddy and the Muscle Academy about the life, art, and times of gay erotic artist Tom of Finland. Bottom line: even with a smattering of decent archival extras, Paris Was a Woman remains an undistinguished documentary that will appeal primarily to literature buffs.]