Paris Was a Woman

In my search to find a Bellingham equivalent of Seattle's most wonderful Scarecrow Video, I found Film is Truth. A great local place with a nice selection of both old and new movies, where I stumbled across the film, Paris Was a Woman. An intriguing title, so I picked it up.

Paris Was a Woman is a documentary about the women of Paris during the inter-war period where literary and artistic salons flourished. Women, many expatriates, flocked there to become writers, poets, artists, muses, salon hostess, lovers and often times many of the above. Characters of the like of Gertrude Stein (writer and poet), Alice B. Toklas, Colette (writer), Sylvia Beach (owner of Shakespeare and Company) and Josephine Baker (entertainer and singer) knew and nurtured people like Pablo Picasso, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway and Ezra Pound. It was an incredibly artistically productive period in Paris, producing some of the twenieth centuries most famous works. The film inspired me to try reading Gertrude Stein again, even if her style pains me.

The thing that gets me the most, are that the women of this film are fierce intellectuals, who refusing to be tied down by social constructs of marriage, monogamy, heterosexuality, and patriarchy strike out to redefine what it means to be a woman. They are women to be admired for their courage and creativity, but in many ways are unknown next to the big male names of the era. I would like to purpose a toast to these women, who were unafraid to live life on their own terms.