FOR CLAUDE AND FOR LOLEH
When in January 1938,
Dali's "Rainy Taxi" greets the first visitors
to the International Surrealist Exhibition in Paris,
the press is divided between sarcasm and outrage.
«What to make of this world of threats and ambush?»
André Breton was to write:
It had since revealed itself to be only too prophetic, too justified
in terms of darkness, weirdness, suffocation.
To those who then accused us of relishing that atmosphere,
it would be too easy to reply that in fact
we were a long way from the blackness and the cunning cruelty of the days to come.
If we today have perfect images of this event
rather than blurred newspaper clips,
we owe this to the eye of one woman.
Denise Bellon has grasped this unique moment in time,
when post-war was becoming pre-war.
Each of her photographs shows a past
yet deciphers a future.
REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS TO COME
Why is this necessarily the light of impending war?
An Eiffel Tower, some clouds, a body.
Nothing has dated.
And everything we speak is the end of the thirties,
The discovery of the body.
The constricted body of 1900.
The humiliated and martyred body of World War I
is winning its freedom.
Sports, camping, holidays, swimming, mountain climbing,
nudity which totalitarian countries will swiftly turn into mass demonstrations.
Everyone said that the popular front meant for many,
discovering the sea.
Do you really know what it was like to discover the sea, when you'd only seen it at the movies?
To discover the sky as well.
The same year saw the emergence of amateur parachuting.
Here, memory deciphers.
Soon, there will be no more parachutists
only paratroopers.
And the sight of an outstretched body, close to a river,
will inevitably evoke that of other bodies spread out on the roads,
after the Stukas are flown over.
The long distance aircraft.
The compact professional camera.
The meeting of these two objects begets photo-reportage.
The Alliance Photo Agency is created in 1934:
Capturing the moment, discovering the world.
An era is beginning.
Capa, Seymour, Pierre Boucher, Denise Bellon
throw themselves into the adventure.
They belong to that time.
They share the eagerness of the seaside vacationers,
the courage of Sunday parachutists.
To be a photographer means not only to look,
but to sustain the gaze of others.
Of a writer, perhaps Jean Giono.
Of an actor, perhaps Jean-Louis Barrault.
Or of Henry Miller.
A leper in Morocco.
A beauty from the desert.
A young girl with a cat.
A painter with a cat.
A painter without a cat.
She will seek out Picasso at his home
and, in Africa, the masks which inspire him.
The savage beauty that her surrealist friends, above all André Breton,
helped her to understand.
When Breton dedicates the first edition of one of his books to her,
it implies that the understanding goes both ways
and that as for looking at the world he knows a few things are to himself.
Breton had the perfect eye, the way some have perfect pitch.
He immediately singled out Matta, and was to miss very few others.
He sees in Yves Tanguy, the painter of frightful elegances,
aerial, subterranean and maritime
which could distance him from Joan Miro
and his nursery drawings for grown-ups.
But he also writes that a work of art, worthy of the name,
is that which makes us recover the fresh emotion of childhood.
He would say of Derain: "This extraordinary man whose paintings I hate
but whose conversation I adore."
The eye is never fooled by intelligence
but when the two come together
it's the unique encounter:
That of Marcel Duchamp.
Thus, the photographer allows us to see the gaze which in this century
has changed ours the most.
A slight shift of angle,
and it's as if he could foresee the misunderstanding which was to await him.
He wanted to reveal the vanity of art,
one day he'll be used to vindicate the art of the vanity.
The surrealists idolized the postman Ferdinand Cheval, known as Le Facteur Cheval.
Photos of whom are offered to magazine readers by Denise Bellon.
Breton again:
"Cheval's ideal palace,
this splendid labyrinth surrounded by gigantic statues and grottos
reveals the possibility of finally ending the everlasting opposition
between dream and reality."
Le Facteur sought his inspiration in natural forms
as did Max Ernst put his stone rubbings out of which he created landscapes.
Denise Bellon turns the tables and acts as a full-fledged surrealist herself
when she photographs imprints, moldings,
anatomical models
and transforms them into works of art, merely with the force of her eye.
They are called the shattered faces.
This expression will outlive the last of them.
Survivors the great war
whose faces were sculpted by a crazed postman.
They gather, they demonstrate,
they show the world what war can do to men
to testify,
to alert.
Everyone knows what followed.
In the case of writer Joë Bousquet, the wound is invisible.
A bullet in the spinal column in 1918,
paralyzed him for life.
Simone Weil writes to him
"You have war lodged in your body.
To dwell upon misfortune, it must be borne in the flesh."
Because she knew how to look at misfortune, the way women do,
with simplicity,
the photographer wins the writer's confidence and friendship.
He thanks her for her images.
He writes her that
they show that I live in darkness and that your hands know how to bring me to life.
The advent of the woman's magazine seems light-years away from all this.
But it does reflect the great social revolution of the time.
Obviously the editorial advise now seems a little dated.
When the outcome of a holiday flirtation is to have
"His respectable father asked for the hand of our cherished daughter"
one senses that we are not in the year 2000.
MAY I MARRY MY BROTHER IN LAW?
But it also holds some delightful surprises.
Here are two young girls
obviously mad about chocolate.
The photographer had her two daughters, Yannick and Loleh,
pose for this publicity
called announcement in those days.
Placed between news items and long distance reports,
this page of a family album will never be interrupted.
Yannick and Loleh, Loleh and Yannick.
Is that because they were exposed so early to the magnetism of images
that both will take up professions related to the image?
Yannick, the film director.
Loleh, the film and theatre actress,
then, the playwright.
Then entering into her sister's images
when Yannick has her star in her own films.
Inseparable, our little chocolat lovers .
One behind the camera, one in front.
One visible,
the other invisible.
But always together.
In that strange spring of pre-war Paris
which seems in memory to have been its only season,
the Belon sisters live their lives
between the Luxembourg gardens and the Sorbonne.
These university walls that were one day resound with historical proclamations
house a quite reasonable youth.
Protest at the time was to the Far Right
but readings and frequenting cafés is more important than demonstrating.
Paris is thus an extremely livable city
with as much space around the cars as around the pedestrians.
Fancy cars,
drivers who cruise in their Citroën cars called Citron for short.
So many words of that era have a delightful passé feel about them
when it's legal in France to advertise Alcohol and even Socialism.
Don't call a cop a cop,
It's an insult.
Truand is a medieval term for bandit.
Work is done by hand.
Paris changes slowly.
The workmen in the streets have the bearing of peasants
and sometimes they are peasants:
Barely disembarked,
immigrants from the country, foreigners to Parisians.
They pour asphalt as though they were pouring wine.
Draft horses can be seen outside the Gates of the Tuileries.
Does the photographer believe that the unchanging can be captured in her collection of bridges?
But then the names will do the change.
There's already a Pont Neuf bridge, a Bercy bridge
but no Bir Hakeim bridge.
Nobody knows where Bir Hakeim is, nor Birkenau
which will follow it in the dictionary with a comment:
"very close to Auschwitz".
But the true feeling of the pre-war France is founded at cinema.
A cinema never to be seen again.
THE RULE OF THE GAME
Quai des brumes
Later, Henri Langlois
will see in Jean Gabin's character during this period
a pre-figuration of the Resistance Fighter.
Who is Henri Langlois?
A man who is not resigned to the disappearance of films
but instead, piles them up in his bathtub.
One wondered whether this tale was a myth.
Denise Bellon is there to answer.
Here, the only existing image of the legendary bathtub,
cradle of all cinematheques.
Cinematheque Francaise, Museum of Cinema.
true or false Musidora. authentic posters.
Cinema has entered culture.
During the German Occupation, these treasures were secretly move around in a baby carriage.
Here too, the only preserved image.
Amusing to imagine the "Battleship Potemkin" on board this vehicle.
Time travel.
The photograph who attends Langlois' homage to the Lumière brothers
meets Auguste Lumière himself
at the end of his life.
Pensive.
He reportedly told Méliès that his invention did not have any commercial future.
Contradicted by the century,
does he simply surmise he opened Pandora's Box?
Yet photography is faring well.
It's use to refresh failing memories
or to convince non-believers.
"Look, Kilroy was there".
In front of the Cliffs at Etretat
or the 1937 World Fair.
To send a postcard is evidence.
I saw the worker and the kolkhoz women at Mujina away from Moscow for the first time
and who will personify the U.S.S.R. for years.
It's one of the events of the Exhibition.
On the pediment of the brand new Palais de Chaillot
inscriptions by Paul Valéry that get a big laugh from the extreme right.
"Semi sibylline, semi ridiculous".
The opening play: Giraudoux's "Electra".
Communist poet Aragon had a tuxedo made for the inauguration of the Soviet Pavilion.
By placing face to face the pavilions of two nations that will confront each other
the architects see further than the politicians.
Strange these world fairs had precede disaster.
At the beginning of the century, the 1900 Exhibition,
arrogantly affirmed Europe's world domination.
A little later, Europe was to program its own suicide.
It seems that nations on the verge of war
make a point of parading their wealth;
like misers who in their final death throes want to recount their treasures.
But in 1937,
the treasures hardly impress anymore.
Peace sounds false,
the celebration seems empty.
The beautiful light of '36 starts to dim.
The pavilions of the World Fair once demolished
will leave an empty field for the exterminators.
In geography text books of the time there was a very recognizable pink color.
It included most of Africa and a small part of Asia,
and it was called the French Empire.
"How lucky these negroes were", the school boys thought,
"to live on a pink planet".
First, she saw the beauty,
then the everyday life.
She saw the markets and the villages. It was her first trip to AOF:
'Afrique occidentale francaise'.
She went further, crossed rivers.
She saw the work in the forests.
She followed the cycle of exploitation in the diamond mines.
She saw the two faces of colonialism:
One face for exploiting,
one face for charity.
She hid neither of them.
She shares moments of relaxation and attends protocol ceremonies,
like the visit to the Governor.
Here, memory shifts again:
This very governor is soon to be replaced by the man who will forbid De Gaulle
to disembark in Dakar.
Had he held his post,
perhaps the entire history of the war would have been different.
The long straight trail heads north again.
It has its legend and its magical words:
"Oil drum Number 5"
"Transaharan"
The Sahara is our Far West.
With a bonus: camels and tuareg,
that the Yanks do not have.
At the very end of the trail, the Magreb,
ten years earlier the war of the Rif had ended.
General Pétain had crushed a rebellion supported by the surrealists
while an appeal to the french soldiers, for solidarity with the rebels,
was launched by a young Communist Deputy, an future fascist named Jacques Doriot.
"The bastards hold the plain"
is not a headline in a racist newspaper,
It's a quote from a Legionaire song, then in vogue.
The legend persists of the handsome Legionnaire fighter,
even if his rifle was often traded for spade,
like his ancestor in the Roman Legions.
The war of the Rif is over.
However, Marshal Lyautey, more lucid than others,
wrote that the faithfulness of the people
made of resignation and of the feel of our strength
is not immune to any challenge and can suddenly falter.
Words which herald all the colonial wars to come.
But when Denise Bellon discovers Magreb,
everything seems peaceful.
The protectorate in Morocco and in Tunisia,
the fiction of the three departments of Algeria
maintain the image of a calm territory.
Even on the left, nobody thinks of independence.
North Africa is a vast territory;
half construction-site, half bazaar
where France feels at home.
There, again, one needed a woman's eye to return to these soldiers' whores
their share of beauty.
She will proof it magnificently by visiting the restricted area of Tunis.
Renoir had already painted a woman of pleasure with a sad look.
One day she photographs a Jewish wedding at Djerba.
Another day, a gypsy marriage in Paris.
In 1939, the word "Gypsy" evokes musicians at best,
at worst chicken thieves,
and when feminized by the French language: a brand of cigarettes.
They are called gypsies, tinkers, romanies.
In the year 2000 in the Balkans, they will be the roms;
still undefined, still distrusted.
Under the name of gypsies, they will enter to vocabulary of the holocaust;
ranking second after the Jews.
And by one of those shortcuts
that reading all of magazines sometimes provides,
it's in the same issue of «Match» whose beautiful gipsy bride made the cover
that one can read extracts from Mein Kampf.
Did all the African tribal leaders really read the page of Mein Kampf
where Hitler calls them half-monkeys
as the author of the text puts it?
One wonders.
The article is entitled "The Black Army"
and introduces Moro Naba, Emperor of the Mossi.
This ostentatious title
refers to a customary chief appointed by the French
to maintain order and collect taxes.
It's September 1939.
The literacy campaign in Black Africa is finding a practical application,
reading the posters for army mobilization.
The same ones are being put up on the walls of towns all over France.
As the rule now requires reporters to personalize their stories' subjects,
Noaga the conscript enters the scene,
he who'll leave his fiancé to rush to the aid of western civilization.
One would like to know what became of Noaga the conscript
one year later,
two years later,
ten years later,
supposing he'll live ten more years.
At the other end of a long diagonal line,
another country mobilizes alongside France and England;
Finland.
its battles will be amongst the best filmed of the war
and for rather a peculiar reason:
For over year, all the cameramen were practicing to cover a major event:
The Olympic Games of 1940.
The games will take place, but 1952, after the storm.
By its heroism, Finland wins the admiration of the world, with a twist:
His heroism is exercised against the Red Army.
Something inconceivable has blurred the data,
The German-Soviet pact.
When Hitler attacks Russia,
Germany will find itself allied with Finland
which will have surprisingly manage to enter the conflict on the good side
and exit on the bad side
without era having changed its enemy.
But if, as is probable,
the summer maneuvers were photographed before the invasion of Poland,
these are the first images of WWII.
A mobilized France quickly resorts to the practices of 1914.
"Be quiet, beware, enemy ears are listening".
As if muteness were more important than tanks.
Pacifist forces are hunted down,
A last surrealist leaflet tries to defend them.
One finds there for the first time, amongst those of Breton and Péret,
the signature of Denise Bellon.
A newspaper incensed by the surrealist exhibition
indicated that many names had a foreign flavor:
Names like Max Ernst,
Victor Brauner.
Now the journalist must feel relieved:
On the list of internment camps, these names find their proper place.
In fact, the slogan which dominates this period
sounds a bit like a surrealist proverb:
With your old scrap iron we will forge victorious steel.
A curious way to start a war
piling up all your cooking pots, bedpans, gas burners.
The uprising of the boilers!
Independence day for the watering cans!
One already imagines the monuments:
To the Unknown Ragman, the Grateful Motherland.
Every owner of a coffee maker sees it melted down into a victorious bullet,
to be blasted into Teutonic flesh.
At the same time, censorship broadcasts strange instructions like:
Do not mention the heroic death of the stationmaster of Abbeville,
who, by the way, is not dead.
IF 2.000 YOUNG PEOPLE WILL BRING IN A WEEK
1 KG OF SCRAP, 1 KG OF OLD RAGS 1 KG OF OLD PAPER
WE'LL GET A TOTAL WEIGHT OF 2 TONS
Thus, France will protect itself with collected scrap metal:
Arranged in rows, and literally drafted.
One imagines them ready for roll call.
To whoever remembers the German newsreels of the attack on Dunquerque,
this piece of road inevitably evokes another road,
bordered by cars and smithereens,
destroyed tanks,
tractor shorn of their Caterpillar wheels
when victorious steel has turned back to old scrap.
The soldiers of 1914
left for the front in crimson trousers
which made them sitting ducks for the enemy.
In 39-40, the coats and capes of 1918 reappear, unchanged.
Always one war late. The image captured it before the historians did.
A famous film "Drole de Drame" gave its name to this period.
'The phony war'.
Foremost, a winter when France will learn what it's fate would be in the coming years:
Cold, hunger,
deprivations of every kind.
On the front, nothing happens.
Something not in short supply are gas masks which will never be used.
France is still preparing for WWI
as is Britain
which developed a gas mask for hens
so they do not see slaying eggs during air raids.
In the streets, the small trades which already seem of another era
will again find their usefulness before disappearing forever.
The bicycle taxi will replace the motor car.
To photograph the bicycles,
to photograph the last ox herd crossing through Lyon,
to photograph the city of Lyon itself
and unwittingly, to indicate the places which will make it the capital of the underground.
To photograph the secret passage ways, labyrinth known only to their inhabitants
which will later provide hideouts and intercut networks.
Unknowingly, one is preparing.
Unknowingly, repairing a radio will open a bridge in the wall.
And now comes the sweetness of the last evenings of peace
when standing at midnight on an illuminated Pont Neuf
will soon become an image of paradise lost.
Actor Charles Dullin prepares the production of an opera by Darius Milhaud: Medea.
The premiere should take place on eighth of May 1940.
There will be three presentations.
On the tenth, the German offensive starts
and it's the end of the phony war.
In the end of Alliance Photo,
six years that changed photo journalism,
some will join Capa in New yourk and found the Magnum Agency.
For Denise Bellon, born Denise Hulmann
no more foreign assignments.
She devotes her beloved photography to the least offensive of subjects.
Lyon, which will be her refuge provides plenty.
She will even see the arrival of all the retreating Parisian press.
There will thus be two Paris-Soirs
one in Paris and one in Lyon, appearing under the same name.
Some job for the archivists.
However, there is only one Figaro
and undoubtedly only one Action Française
with right wing guru Charles Maurras.
The unyielding nationalist
as violently anti-Hun as anti-Jew
will end up writing that if the death penalty is not enough to stop the Gaulists
it will be necesary to take members of their families as hostages and execute them.
L'Action Française, January 3, 1944.
Photograph nature.
Photograph friends.
Photograph the growing girls.
A son who has been born.
Photograph while waiting.
She is in Marseille, just in time to capture images of the devastated port.
One day, "This Dove From the Ark":
A newspaper seller, real newspapers
where it will be again be possible to publish.
Her first reportage is the most intriguing one.
On Spanish Republican maquis in the Pyrenees.
In 1944?
In 1944.
Because there was indeed an attempt to reconquer Franco's Spain by the Republicans
through an opening in the Aran Valley.
An insane attempt, suicidal
counting, as did Che in Bolivia
on the uprising of a population which will not rise.
It's difficult to quantify the losses.
The two camps standing to confuse figures and propaganda.
The consequences were to be catastrophic for the Spanish Communist Party
and the failure of the operation would feed many future showdowns.
But this forgotten event, ignored by most books, happened for real
and these photos are perhaps only trace which remains for history.
When the two little sisters return to Saint-Germain-des-Pres
it's hardly the mythical place portrayed by the press.
It's a small village of friends.
They are greeted by beautiful faces.
Their names are Serge Reggiani,
Gérard Philipe,
Roger Blin.
In the role of the merry owl,
Jacques Prévert,
who decided to publish the poems that he always kept in his pockets.
With him, Denise Bellon, finds again her beloved surrealists.
Here too, the war has gone by.
Desnos died during deportation.
Dali became a Franco supporter.
Matta was excommunicated after a clash with Breton.
No matter. They'll find each other again.
You can't excommunicate an oeuvre.
A new surrealist exhibition opens in 1947.
The greatest upheaval of the century has taken place between these two small islands of strangeness,
as between two hands.
One thing however did not changed.
The insults are the same as in 1938.
Nonetheless, the adjective 'surrealist'
which in the interval had become somewhat obsolete,
regain an irresistible vogue.
All that deviates, even slightly, from rational reason
qualifies as surrealist.
What remains of the original revolt?
With its delirium, its insufferable aspects,
its series of excommunications,
its wild political swings.
The surrealist movement sometimes unknowingly conveyed a true yearning for freedom
that 'unshatterable core of night'
which Breton referred to about something else.
Her long friendship with the Surrealists had exposed Denise Bellon
to this secret radiation
which influenced not only her eye.
She will always remain faithful to it.
In the artificial natural of the Retz desert,
she brings them together one last time.
Having turned up in full force,
the group poses with the ephemeral solemnity of a class picture.
And in spite everything, once again prophetic.
The history of the century's end will be that of it's masks.
Gone and never to return
and being for myself alone
a remembrance of things to come
who fancied being a human.
Claude Roy
Photographs Denise Bellon
film Yannick Bellon Chris Marker