Postcards from Paris

Remember slideshows? Before Facebook photo albums and e-mail, the way that friends and family would share their adventures abroad was to make slides of their photographs and gather in a darkened living room to watch them projected large on a scroll-down paper screen. This is the structure that director Andrew Shemin has chosen for his aptly titled documentary, "Postcards from Paris." Each clip is like an animated slide, forgoing more than a century of cinematic innovation to harken back to the world's first documentaries, the 1895 static-camera actualite films of the Lumiere Brothers. Shemin's bare-bones technique for observing street life in long takes afford the audience the time to absorb the atmosphere of the scene while closer examination of the image is rewarded with poetical layers of recurring imagery, visual double-entendres, and sudden moments of transcendental beauty, all set to a musical score that evokes the romance, nostalgia, and discovery of a lonesome stroll through Paris. With a perspective on the city that is both exterior and interior--Shemin is an American who lived for 10 years in Paris--"Postcards from Paris" avoids the familiar pitfalls of the hackneyed slideshow with a constantly evolving vision of Paris that toys deftly with the city's well-worn cliches. From the first shot--a sculpture of railroad clocks with stopped hands pointing to a long-expired hour--to the last--a tourist boat fading away into a golden sunset--the movie passes through familiar monuments, exotic immigrant shops, private kisses, public drunkenness, still statues, rhythmic dancers, and lots of tourists taking pictures of themselves. But the film in its totality captures much more than a series of verite postcard moments. It swells to the image of a Paris real or imagined in every human heart.