{"id":2741,"date":"2013-11-20T15:07:31","date_gmt":"2013-11-20T15:07:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/?p=2741"},"modified":"2025-05-13T07:38:50","modified_gmt":"2025-05-13T07:38:50","slug":"pierre-joris-cinema-de-la-paix","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/2741\/pierre-joris-cinema-de-la-paix\/","title":{"rendered":"PIERRE JORIS: Cin\u00e9ma de la Paix"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Remembrance<\/a>On Sunday mornings, in the church across the street from my grandmother\u2019s confiserie cum movie theater, during the eleven o\u2019clock high mass, we were told by the priest \u2014 I believe his name was H\u00e4r Meyer \u2014 at just the moment when I had started to think this through on my own, how we had gotten here (to Ettelbruck?) in the first place. At The Beginning, he informed us, we had been in Paradise & that we, well, actually a woman, of course, of course, a woman had screwed that up and so now we had to live or rather labor by the sweat of our brows etc., that is, survive this early loss in some kind of nasty limbo called our base world and pay our dues through the nose. It was further decreed that after we had shuffled off this mortal coil, if we had suffered enough and had been righteous enough, and after being tried and given admittance by a saint after whom I was named, well, then we may gain access to a revamped version of paradise now re-named heaven.<\/p>\n

Why was paradise taken away from our beginning and transferred to our end? At the beginning it was real, but put at the end, it certainly looked like blackmail, if you thought about it hard enough. Why should paradise\/heaven have to be a carrot dangling from a stick in front of us that we may possibly nibble on after the bitter end? It did not make sense. How could it be paradise, I wondered \u2014 as the dr\u00e4i H\u00e4ren picked up their ritual again & I, also an altar boy in those days, but not for much longer, carried their big book from one side of the altar to the other (or am I confused & I carried only the wine and the water?) \u2014 how could that be paradise when it will be the invisible, shivering soul all alone waiting for who knows how many eternities until the end of time when the body will finally be put back together with some divine UHU Alleskleber and reunited with that ethereal bit that\u2019s been waiting forlorn and all alone in some kind of Johnny-Come-Lately paradise?<\/p>\n

Why can\u2019t paradise remain, be, at the beginning, as we open our eyes to the world \u2014 and see the world for the first time? We\u2019d see that this is paradise, this here and now, our childhood, not so much as a fixed place, but as the process of marveling at the world unfolding. Paradise as the ongoing discovery and unveiling of a world always stretching further out and beyond what we\u2019ve been limited to. From the mother\u2019s body into the first room and then suddenly old enough to leave the room and walk into the garden behind the house \u2014 paradise, remember, from Persian, etymologically means garden. And then it becomes the friend\u2019s house beyond the parental house we now know too well and are chafing at the bit to get out of if only for one night \u2014 and later it\u2019s the city beyond the town we grew up in, the country beyond the one we are told we belong to. It is that movement, as the new comes at us, as it unveils itself to us on the horizon, as we draw closer, unrolling the always self- revealing, extending horizon-world: that is paradise, the place where you discover what you are not or not yet, the diastole place, where you take in the new through all your pores.<\/p>\n

In my childhood, that paradisiacal incarnation was for some time called the \u201cCin\u00e9ma de la Paix,\u201d the old movie \u201cpalace\u201d separated from the church by the square (where my father, as a child, claimed to shoot lions in his games), the street, d\u2019Grosgass, and part of the building that also contained the confiserie Joris-Wantz, \u201cd\u2019Maison Joris.\u201d a paradise it became especially the more H\u00e4r Meyer and his ilk screamed from the pulpit, calling it a den of temptation, making it into that other place, a hell of iniquity. Their hell, my paradise. The building itself was demolished I know not when, a bank replaced it, thus appeasing the generations-old conflict between the great new art of the 20C, cinema, and the old values of the bishopric, catholic conservatism. The bank is of course the perfect counterpart, the most accurate reflection of the Vatican\u2019s overbearing values. Peace has come to the square. All that remains (at least accessible from here, New York) is an extract from the Journal Officiel that goes: \u201cN\u00b0 2341. \u2014 Maison Joris, Cin\u00e9ma de la Paix, Ettelbruck. Confiserie, patisserie, fabrique de biscuits, salon de consommation, cin\u00e9ma \u2014 cr\u00e9e? en 1864, repris en 1903. \u2014 Propri\u00e9taire : Joris, Joseph, Ettelbruck….\u201d<\/p>\n

Well, the movie house must have been added later as the very first theater in the world exclusively devoted to showing motion pictures was the Nickelodeon, which opened on June 19, 1905 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It seems more likely the cin\u00e9ma was added to the confiserie complex sometime after the Great War \u2014 thus its name, a request for or a celebration of peace? \u2014probably in the mid-twenties if the family yarn is to be believed according to which grand-pa Joseph was befriended with Abel Gance who supposedly brought his films per bicycle, and the two watched them \u2014 with no audience bothering to come. Be that as it may, the Rundstedt offensive caused the shelling by American troops of Ettelbruck and confiserie & movie house went up in flames, to be rebuilt after the war, though even with the lights on inside it remained a sort of grey cement box. By the time I was allowed into paradise, it was known around town as the Fl\u00e9ik\u00ebscht, the fleebox (as a newer, more modern and larger movie palace had opened called the ABC near the railway station \u2014 as if you needed to know the ABC to go to the movies! silly name, I thought even back then).<\/p>\n

But what a treat for a kid! At eight I stayed for some 3 months with my grand-mother in that very building before my parents moved up to Ettelbruck & so I got used to free patisseries downstairs before going upstairs to catch a free movie. Paradise indeed. When the cops came to make sure no under 16 was in the house, I would sneak into the projection booth and watch from there through one of the small slots, waiting for the policeman to leave. I remember a vast mixture of movies, half in black & white, half in color, many American, but also German and French, with some Italian flicks thrown in. Given the BENELUX, most were subtitled in Dutch and French, a confusing mess at the bottom of the screen \u2014 & so it was a treat to listen to the American flicks, mainly oaters & war & gangster flicks, in their laconic scripts, and picking up much of the American vernacular along the way.<\/p>\n

And the weirdness of the double-headers: thinking back I put together a classic double feature from around 1956 or 1957, a German movie, such as Bis wir uns wiedersehn<\/em>, the 1952 O.W. Fischer \/ Maria Schell Heimat-drama-weepie, followed by the 1956 John Ford Western The Searchers<\/em>. Us young boys would suffer, snicker, giggle through the German weepie, even sneak out to get some sweets if so bored one couldn\u2019t wait for the eskimo glace? lady during the break. I could sneak to the patisserie to cadge another moerekap, a \u201cmoor\u2019s head,\u201d as my favorite pastry was, oh so racistically, called. And yet, despite these heroic shows of bored superiority when faced with tragic love drama and its sexual innuendos, images did lodge deep in the mind, & some remain there more than fifty plus years later. Thus I remember the closing shot with Maria Schell standing at an upstairs window looking out, the camera behind her, revealing what she sees as she smiles through tears: a man on a stretcher being pushed into the back of an ambulance and driven off. And in some strange way, this image resounded across that sunday afternoon, in rhyme and contrast with several images from The Searchers, where the camera from inside the ranch house frames the dark doorway while the bright outside of the Western Plain reveals the hero, John Wayne of course, forbidden or forbidding himself entry, and turning to ride off into the sunset as behoves the lonesome cowboy.<\/p>\n

Is it any surprise that we grew up dreaming of an American paradise, open space to roam in without family attachments, with adventures lurking around every butte, a full-color paradise beckoning? As against the drab black-and-white of whatever European grey town that street had been on, where the hero, shot in a previous scene, only leaves the house \u201cfeet forward,\u201d as they\u2019d say in the western, dead on a stretcher to be shunted into an ambulance, from one claustrophobic space to another, leaving behind a sobbing\/laughing woman who believes that the killing was a trick, a fake, a way to smuggle her lover into safety. Later, many years later, I thought of calling a collection of poems \u201cThe European Book of the Dead,\u201d but didn\u2019t, finally, though I\u2019m still not sure why.
\nBut when the Paradise of the Cin\u00e9ma de la Paix had worn off as I grew older, and knowing by then that the one proposed by H\u00e4r Meyer, was but the great confidence trick I had begun to smell out even as I helped at the altar, I lit out for the territory, moved across continents, to America, indeed \u2014 and write this now from here, New York City, another true paradise, yes it is, yes it is, with all the dreck that belongs to it \u2014 & the only one I have ever wanted, and gained access to. The End. A Universal Picture.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Pierre Joris is a poet, translator, essayist & anthologist who has published more than 50 books, most recently,\u00a0Meditations on the Stations of Mansur al-Hallaj\u00a0<\/i>(poems) from Chax Press and\u00a0The University of California Book of North African Literature\u00a0<\/i>(volume 4 in the\u00a0Poems for the Millennium\u00a0<\/i>series), coedited with Habib Tengour.\u00a0Exile is My Trade: A Habib Tengour Reader<\/i>\u00a0edited & translated by Joris, and\u00a0Pierre Joris:\u00a0 Cartographies of the In-between<\/i>, essays on Joris\u2019 work edited by Peter Cockelbergh, came out in 2012. Forthcoming are\u00a0Barzakh<\/i>\u00a0\u2014\u00a0Poems 2000-2012<\/i>\u00a0(Black Widow Press) &\u00a0Breathturn Into Timestead:The Collected Later Poems of Paul Celan<\/i>\u00a0(FSG).<\/span><\/p>\n

http:\/\/pierrejoris.com<\/span><\/a>\u00a0<\/span>
\nNomadics blog:\u00a0http:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On Sunday mornings, in the church across the street from my grandmother\u2019s confiserie cum movie theater, during the eleven o\u2019clock high mass, we were told by the priest \u2014 I believe his name was H\u00e4r Meyer \u2014 at just the moment when I had started to think this through on my own, how we had […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2664,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"footnotes":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false},"categories":[35,12],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/11\/pothead2.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p42xiC-Id","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2741"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2741"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2741\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2873,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2741\/revisions\/2873"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2664"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2741"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2741"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2741"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}