Cinema, music, photography: the metro that inspires artists
Cinema
One of Paris’s ghost stations is used as a film set. You can recognise Porte de Lilas-Cinéma in The Fabulous World of Amélie. She walks through Abesses station - in the scene in which Si tu n'etais pas là plays on a gramophone - which in the story is the closest to her home but was filmed at Porte de Lilas-Cinéma. Besides, there would be hell to pay if the metro had to stop every time they made films or advertisements in Paris!
Music
Even the great Édith Piaf dedicated a song to the city's - ever moving - underground system: Le métro de Paris. And because art can rewrite whatever it wishes, in this beautiful piece, the metro from 'walking under Paris' at one point 'rises slowly and then flies away over the rooftops'.
Let's listen to it together
Photography
JR is one of the world's most celebrated artists and is known for his perfect synthesis of photography and urban art. For him, they are one lexicon. To give a few examples, in 2004, he photographed the riots that erupted in the Banlieues, and produced his first major public project, pasting large prints of the faces he had captured around the city. Two years later, he created Portrait of a Generation, portraits of suburban 'punks', and plastered the wealthiest neighbourhoods of Paris with the faces of the counterculture.
However, he has done many pasteup projects, from Face 2 Face, with which he contrasts Israelis and Palestinians with giant photographs, or Women are Heroes, with which he immortalises the faces of women he has met, photographed in Kenya, Brazil, India and Cambodia. These women are the first victims of war and violence, but they endure it with great dignity.
These giant faces are both a warning and a message of hope. And again the project in partnership with the New York City Ballet, when he used the language of dance to convey his vision of the riots in the Clichy-Montfermeil district; JR will carry out the design for the Clichy-Montfermeil station. Also his work in the abandoned hospital of Ellis Island, a significant and iconic place in the history of immigration, where he shot Ellis, a short with Robert De Niro. In 2016, he even made the Louvre Pyramid disappear with his applied photographs.
Why are we telling you this story? Well, JR was born in 1983 in Paris. He grew up with the myth of street art, and his graffiti tag was Face3.
In 2001, something happened that changed his life. He found a camera in the Paris metro. Someone had lost or forgotten it. No trace of the owner. It became his, and this was the start of a great story.