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GreatBritish1
  • 6/25/2025
Transcript
00:00On the 25th of March, 1928, a young American composer arrived in Paris with grand ambitions.
00:16He wanted to capture the distinctive atmosphere of the city in a piece of music.
00:22The composer's name was George Gershwin, and his inspiration came from the streets themselves.
00:30Gershwin was overwhelmed by the noise, the pace, and the energy of this city.
00:36And he used that energy, including the energy of the traffic itself, to create one of the most exhilarating pieces of music of the century.
00:44And he called it an American in Paris.
00:47It is a glorious piece of music, and it captures the spirit of Paris perfectly.
01:02Elegant, exuberant, and romantic.
01:05Like so many others before him, George Gershwin thought Paris was the most exciting place on the planet.
01:16But you know what?
01:17I think it was never more exciting than in the year he actually wrote that piece.
01:221928.
01:311928 was the high point of an unusually creative decade.
01:35It was the year that the Surrealists brought their irrational world order to the people.
01:43When European émigrés set the city alight with their ambitious dreams.
01:48When visiting Americans launched sparkling careers.
01:52And when utopian modernists redesigned the world.
01:58One city, one exceptional year.
02:04But like all the best parties, it would come to a dramatic end.
02:10This is the story of Paris in 1928.
02:14The bash before the crash.
02:16In the early 1920s, Paris was still recovering from the First World War.
02:41There were food queues and damaged buildings.
02:46Disillusionment and grief.
02:49But by the end of the decade, Paris had somehow rebuilt its reputation as the most glamorous city in the world.
02:57Attracting the finest artists, writers, and thinkers of the day.
03:02It was the great interwar utopia where everything was up for grabs.
03:07And everyone was living in the moment.
03:11The centre of this party in 1928 was Montparnasse.
03:16A cheap, run-down neighbourhood on the left bank.
03:20And the centre of Montparnasse was a café called La Coupole.
03:25Which had just opened its doors.
03:26In 1928, La Coupole was the largest restaurant in Paris.
03:45And its interior is an art deco masterpiece with jazz age colours, cubist mosaics, and 33 famous pillars.
03:54Each of which was painted by an artist from Montparnasse.
03:57John, so what was so appealing about Paris in the 1920s?
04:06Oh, where to start?
04:09The people coming to Paris in the 1920s came here for three reasons.
04:14One, because they were rich.
04:15Women came here to buy their trousseau, to get a French maid, to get a French chef.
04:20The men came here to go to the brothels, to buy art, to hunt and so on.
04:24At the other end of the spectrum, you came here because you were poor, because food was cheap.
04:30If you had to starve in a garret, whether you'd learn to become a great musician or a great writer,
04:36you could starve longer in Paris than you could in any other civilised city in the world.
04:42And then in the middle were people who came here because you could do stuff that you couldn't do elsewhere.
04:47What made Paris so attractive to artists?
04:51Everybody who came here believed that they were going to succeed because it was Paris.
04:56You could go and learn from Matisse.
04:58You could go and visit Picasso and he would explain what he'd been doing.
05:04I mean, that's priceless. Where else does that happen?
05:07It was a magnet. It drew people from all around the world.
05:11And within this crucible, new movements were formed.
05:15After all, you cannot point to another city where so many artistic movements began and rose to their peak.
05:25It was a great time to be an artist, really. I wish I'd been there, frankly.
05:39So what was Paris' next big art movement?
05:42Well, it would be stranger than anything before or since.
05:49It was called Surrealism.
05:52And its ringleader was a mischievous and highly original writer called André Breton.
06:01Breton had been a doctor during the First World War.
06:04Like many people, the conflict changed him.
06:10And it led him to a revelation.
06:19Breton concluded that Europe was rotten to its core.
06:24Reason, logic, capitalism, the great motors of Western civilisation had led the world into the most terrible disaster in its history.
06:35What was needed now was a fundamental change.
06:39A revolution that would come from within every single one of us.
06:46Breton's antidote to the horrors of war was to celebrate the absurdity of the human experience.
06:52And so Breton and his friends opened a very unusual office.
07:04How are you recovering from the First World War?
07:06What have you ever done in your secret?
07:09It's okay.
07:09What do you luster?
07:10What's the very worst thing you've ever done?
07:12Tell me about your nightmares.
07:13All is confidential.
07:14I used to be a doctor.
07:16They called it the Bureau of Surrealist Research.
07:23And its purpose was to capture the disruptive energy of the unconscious.
07:28The Bureau of Surrealist Research asked the public to come into the office and confess.
07:36Now, as a member of the public, you could confess pretty much anything.
07:41If you'd had an awful secret you'd been keeping.
07:44If you lusted after a colleague or even a family member.
07:48If you'd committed a crime and not yet got caught.
07:51Or even if you had some unsettling dream or nightmare.
07:55This was the place to reveal everything.
07:58And that was all part of André Breton's plan to explode bourgeois conventions.
08:03To liberate people's unconsciouses.
08:06And to change their lives for good.
08:11The Bureau was open to the public every day.
08:14From 4.30 to 6.30 in the afternoon.
08:17Except Sundays.
08:21There was just one problem.
08:26Not that many people took up the offer to confess their deepest secrets to a complete stranger.
08:34The office files remained largely empty.
08:39But Breton didn't give up.
08:42In the name of the Surrealist Revolution, he decided to write a surreal fantasy of his own.
08:48A book called Nadja, which he published in 1928.
08:59Nadja is a love story.
09:01Without the love and without the story.
09:05It's the tale of an illicit affair set in a strange, haunting Paris.
09:09And it begins with something only a great city like Paris can provide.
09:14A chance encounter.
09:18It is a late autumn afternoon.
09:22Workers are going home for the evening.
09:26Breton is drifting aimlessly along the street.
09:29When he catches sight of a beautiful and mysterious woman.
09:44Without hesitation, he approaches her.
09:48He asks her name.
09:51She tells him,
09:52Nadja.
09:54And it turns out, she's everything he's been looking for.
10:03The next day, they meet in a secret square in Paris.
10:07And Nadja begins to tune into a city that Breton can't even see.
10:18She senses crowds where there are none.
10:22She sees bloody visions of the French Revolution in the empty streets.
10:27And even predicts that he'll write a novel about her.
10:33Breton is captivated.
10:36But it's not love that's hooked him.
10:39It seems in Nadja,
10:41he's finally found the perfect symbol of surrealism.
10:46A beautiful enigma with no rational explanation.
10:50A pathway to the unconscious itself.
10:57Breton's haunting book poses more questions than answers.
11:06Who was Nadja?
11:07What happened to her?
11:09Did she even exist?
11:11But one thing is certain.
11:13Breton had turned Paris into a great surrealist dreamscape.
11:18A place that was as seductive and mysterious as Nadja herself.
11:27While André Breton conjured up surrealist fantasies in the cafes of Montparnasse,
11:43one man would close the gap between dreams and reality even more dramatically.
11:49And he would do it very discreetly in the suburbs.
11:56Seven miles east of downtown Paris was a sleepy neighbourhood called Pereur-sur-Marne.
12:04It was an ordinary place full of teachers, dentists and retired accountants going about their business.
12:11And in their midst was a young man who seemed to fit in just perfectly.
12:20This man lived quietly and carefully.
12:25He always wore a suit.
12:27He worked to a strict routine.
12:29He walked his dog at the same time every single day.
12:33And in the evening, his idea of fun was a game of chess.
12:37All in all, he seemed as unremarkable as all the other residents of Pereur-sur-Marne.
12:43But this man was actually an undercover surrealist.
12:47And his name was René Magritte.
12:54Magritte was born in Belgium in 1898.
12:57He had his first exhibition as an artist in Brussels in 1927.
13:03But it was so unsuccessful that he left for Paris to join the Surrealists.
13:14Monsieur Moir, it's James Fox.
13:16Can I get in?
13:17Yes.
13:18Yes.
13:18Yes.
13:19Yes.
13:19Yes.
13:20Yes.
13:20Yes.
13:21Yes.
13:21Yes.
13:22Yes.
13:22Yes.
13:23Yes.
13:24Yes.
13:24Yes.
13:25Yes.
13:25Yes.
13:26Yes.
13:26Yes.
13:27Yes.
13:27Yes.
13:27Yes.
13:28Magritte lived on the top floor of this building with his wife from 1927 to 1930.
13:35Now, Magritte didn't actually have a proper studio space here.
13:37So most of his painting was done in his sitting room.
13:40But if that doesn't sound perfect, it obviously suited him.
13:43Because it was here that he started to paint his first surrealist painting.
13:48Some of the most famous paintings of the 20th century.
13:51And what's more, 1928 was the most productive year of his entire career.
13:57That year he made more than 100 pictures.
13:58That year he made more than 100 pictures.
14:00That's what, more than one every three days.
14:03In his paintings, Magritte played with the bizarre and often amusing tension between dreams and reality.
14:15This painting is called the treachery of images.
14:24We see a pipe and underneath it a sentence that reads, this is not a pipe.
14:30Now, at first, it seems pretty nonsensical.
14:33But Magritte is, of course, completely right.
14:36Because that isn't a pipe.
14:38You can't smoke it.
14:40You can't even hold it.
14:41What it actually is, is a picture.
14:45An arrangement of coloured paint on a canvas.
14:49And it's a reminder, a really important reminder, that it's all too easy to confuse images with
14:55reality.
15:00But perhaps Magritte's most eye-opening work of the period was this one.
15:05The false mirror.
15:09Now this has to be one of the more intimidating paintings in the history of art.
15:14Because when we look at it, it looks back at us.
15:20Now it's filled with surrealist features, not least the absence of eyelashes.
15:24But one of the most enigmatic of them is this beautifully painted cloudy sky.
15:31Now when you first look at this painting, you presume that sky is actually a reflection.
15:34This eye is looking out at a beautiful world with a beautiful sky, and it's being reflected
15:38on the surface of the iris.
15:40But that is not what Magritte intended.
15:43Actually, that sky exists behind the iris, inside the head.
15:48So when you look at this painting, you're actually looking through someone's eye, into
15:52their mind.
15:54And that's what Magritte did so well.
15:56He took the interior world, and he brought it outside.
16:04Today, Magritte's paintings are among the most famous images in 20th century art.
16:15At the time, however, they were virtually unknown.
16:18They simply gathered dust in his suburban sitting room, while he carried on painting.
16:23As news of the surrealist revolution spread through Europe, two flamboyant characters from Spain
16:38joined its ranks.
16:40Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel.
16:44Dalí had just been kicked out of art school, and Buñuel was hungry to make his first movie.
16:51Inspired by André Breton, as soon as they arrived in Paris, they decided to make the
16:59perfect surrealist film.
17:02They had only one rule.
17:05Nothing rational was permitted.
17:08A man attacks a woman.
17:12He turns round.
17:14What does he see?
17:15A flying toad.
17:16Bad.
17:17A bottle of brandy.
17:20Bad.
17:23Two ropes.
17:24Yes.
17:25But what are they attached to?
17:28A cannon.
17:29Bad.
17:30An armchair.
17:33Bad.
17:34A grand piano.
17:38Bad.
17:39Yes.
17:40And on top of it, a donkey.
17:42No.
17:43Two rotting donkeys.
17:45Yes.
17:52They called their film Un Chien Andalou, and it premiered here, at the legendary arthouse
17:58cinema, the Studio des Ursulines.
18:11Everyone who was anyone came to see the film.
18:15Pablo Picasso was here.
18:17The architect Le Corbusier was here.
18:20André Breton and the entire surrealist movement were here.
18:24Now, understandably, the two young filmmakers were extremely anxious.
18:29And, in fact, Luis Buñuel was so nervous about being attacked that he kept stones in
18:34his pockets for self-defence.
18:37And he was right to be vigilant.
18:40Dali and Buñuel had exploited the new language of cinema to create surreal scenes that couldn't
18:58have been achieved in any other medium.
19:01The result was sometimes shocking, sometimes funny, and usually unpleasant.
19:10But one sequence stood out from all the others.
19:15Now, at this point, I'd like to issue a word of warning.
19:20What you're about to see is one of the most shocking scenes in film history.
19:25And if you're at all squeamish, it might be better to close your eyes now.
19:30And when I say close your eyes, I mean it.
19:35And then, he slices open her eye.
19:51It's not a real woman's eye, of course.
19:54If you can bear to look again, you can just make out it's the eye of a dead cow.
20:01Now, I've watched that scene hundreds of times before, and I know it's fake.
20:06But I still find it almost unbearable.
20:09But I think it's not just outer shock.
20:12I think it's symbolic.
20:14It's Dali and Buñuel saying to us, you don't need your eyes anymore.
20:19Because we are taking you into a world of the imagination.
20:27In the end, the stones remained in Buñuel's pockets.
20:31Because the audience loved it.
20:33Un Chien Andalou went on to become a landmark in cinema history.
20:40And it was in many ways the unforgettable culmination of André Breton's Great Surrealist Revolution.
20:48You know, we may think of surrealism as little more than a curiosity from 1920s Paris.
20:55But the Surrealist Revolution did work.
20:58And it did change the way we see the world today.
21:01After all, you may never have heard of André Breton or Louis Buñuel.
21:05But if you hear the word surreal, you'll know exactly what it means.
21:25If the Surrealists wanted to reinvent the world after the Great War,
21:30some people came to Paris to reinvent themselves.
21:37By 1928, there were 200,000 foreigners in the city.
21:41Many of them emigrés from war-torn countries, all dreaming of a better life.
21:49But at least one of them would turn their dreams into reality.
21:55Tamara Gorska was wealthy and beautiful,
22:00and married to one of the most dashing men in Eastern Europe.
22:04But in the midst of the Russian Revolution, he just vanished.
22:10Now she searched the whole country for him,
22:12eventually found him in prison, and somehow helped him escape.
22:16Together they fled the country, and then sometime in 1918 they arrived in Paris.
22:25But they lost everything.
22:30And with a small child to bring up and a husband too depressed to work,
22:34Gorska felt her life had fallen apart.
22:37But then she began to look around her.
22:44The streets of Paris were full of women enjoying new freedoms.
22:50Confident, glamorous women living for the moment, not dwelling on the past.
22:56And Gorska realised that she too could take control of her life.
23:05She enrolled in art school, gave herself a fabulous makeover,
23:11and changed her married name, Lempicka, to the more French-sounding Tamara de Lempicka.
23:23And she made a crucial decision.
23:27D'Lempicka didn't want to be a poor, starving artist.
23:31She wanted to paint the kind of portraits that rich investors wanted to buy.
23:36She focused on modernity's most alluring new characters,
23:40sexually liberated, independent and glamorous women.
23:44Women like herself.
23:46Paris also unlocked D'Lempicka's wild side.
24:03Tamara D'Lempicka had plenty of sexual confidence.
24:08And after parties, she'd come here to the Bois de Boulogne
24:12to pick out a lover from amongst the prostitutes.
24:16Now, one evening, she was walking here
24:18when she saw a woman who was attracting a lot of attention.
24:22D'Lempicka thought she was the most beautiful woman she'd ever seen in her life.
24:27But rather than asking her for sex, as everyone else did,
24:31D'Lempicka asked if she would model for her.
24:34The prostitute considered the proposal,
24:37and eventually said,
24:39yes, why not?
24:46The woman's name was Raffaella,
24:48and she became the subject of some of D'Lempicka's most erotic paintings.
24:56Here is Raffaella, reclining seductively in D'Lempicka's studio.
25:03It is a voluptuous painting, constructed almost entirely of curves.
25:09In fact, even the bottom of the canvas seems to echo the shape of Raffaella's hips.
25:14And it is filled with the promise of sex.
25:18Raffaella looks expectantly up at the artist.
25:21Her red lipstick seems to glow like a warning light.
25:25And that red dress is on the verge of coming off.
25:29And here it has come off, to reveal Raffaella's flesh in all its glory.
25:41But in some ways it's not really like flesh.
25:44D'Lempicka's art is all about surface.
25:47And here she has used tiny, almost invisible brushstrokes,
25:50borrowed from the great Renaissance masters,
25:53so that the skin becomes almost too perfect to be real.
25:56Almost as if it's been manufactured by machine.
26:00But D'Lempicka's most famous painting is of her favourite subject, herself.
26:10Few paintings capture the glamour of the 1920s better than this one.
26:17It's all shine, sheen and shimmer.
26:21And an almost pornographic flaunting of consumer products.
26:25D'Lempicka's car, of course, came from Bugatti.
26:28And her outfit came from HermĂšs.
26:31This is the image of the new woman.
26:35A woman in the driving seat of her own destiny.
26:38A woman leaving the past behind and hurtling into a brighter future.
26:42And that's what Tamara D'Lempicka did.
26:46Together, with the help of Paris, she reinvented herself completely.
26:57Europeans weren't the only foreigners flooding into Paris in the 20s.
27:02By 1928, there were about 40,000 Americans living in the city.
27:07And more were arriving every single day.
27:10They left an America that had become increasingly isolated, backward and illiberal.
27:15And with prohibition, you couldn't even get a drink.
27:18Paris appeared to be the very opposite.
27:21And it had the added benefit of being ridiculously cheap.
27:24No one had quite as good a time in Paris as the American songwriter Cole Porter.
27:39Born in the Midwest back in 1891, Porter was a musical prodigy from the start.
27:53He learned the violin at six, the piano at eight, and wrote his first operetta at ten.
28:00He moved to Paris during the First World War.
28:02And though he had always been wealthy, he found his money went further in Paris than anywhere else.
28:09To call Porter's lifestyle extravagant would be an understatement.
28:19His home was filled with Art Deco furnishings, floor-to-ceiling mirrors, Chippendale chairs, platinum wallpaper,
28:27zebra-skin rugs, and top-of-the-range Steinway pianos.
28:31Porter was the kind of man who didn't have one dressing gown.
28:34He had 16 dressing gowns.
28:37And all of them cost him a fortune.
28:39Porter spent most of 1928 hosting a string of extravagant parties.
28:52But it was also the year when, at the age of 36, he finally found time to write his first hit.
28:59It was a musical called, simply, Paris.
29:03And one of its songs has since become world famous.
29:09Romantic sponges, they say, do it.
29:18Oysters down in Oyster Bay, do it.
29:21Let's do it. Let's fall in love.
29:25Cold Cape Cod, clams gainst their wish, do it.
29:29Even lazy jellyfish, do it.
29:32Let's do it. Let's fall in love.
29:36Electric eels, I might add, do it.
29:41Though it shocks them, I know.
29:43Why ask if Shad, do it.
29:46Waiter, bring me Shadrow.
29:48In shallow shoals, English souls, do it.
29:52Goldfish in the privacy of balls, do it.
29:56Let's do it. Let's fall in love.
30:01Cheers, James. What a great performance.
30:11Cheers, James. Thank you.
30:13So, what do we know about Cole Porter as a man?
30:16Well, I suppose, I mean, I suppose one of the key things about him is that he's a gay man who is married, comes to Paris in 1918 because of the war.
30:27And Cole Porter is from a wealthy family, but he depends on his grandfather.
30:31And that depends on behaving in a way that his grandfather would approve of.
30:36And grandfather's very much a man's man and has constantly been trying to make Cole into a man and failed.
30:44So, Cole's in Paris.
30:46Grandfather doesn't know what he's up to, really.
30:49Paris is a much more liberal city for a gay man.
30:52And, you know, he can tell grandfather and his mother what he's doing, but it may not reflect what he's actually doing.
30:59So, what was Cole Porter actually up to in Paris?
31:01Well, he had a lovely apartment, he's having great parties, he's meeting young men, he's meeting the Demi-Mond, but also the Beaumont.
31:09He's meeting the important people of the day and he's singing and playing, entertaining and having a few drinks.
31:15And what was going on in the 1920s? Was he particularly successful professionally?
31:20Well, he wrote loads of songs at Yale and he continued to write all the way through, really.
31:25But it wasn't until 1928 with Let's Do It that he actually had a big hit.
31:29So, this was a real turning point for him?
31:31Completely, yeah. Yeah. And suddenly he gets that validation of actually being taken seriously.
31:36And that leads to being taken seriously for Anything Goes and into his Hollywood career, where he was perhaps most successful.
31:43The music is playful as well as the words. You can play around with it, you can pull it this way and that's very elastic.
31:49Great piece. You played it beautifully. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. You're a great audience.
31:54If many Americans spent the evenings listening to music, they spent the days in a remarkable English language bookshop by the Seine.
32:12Called Shakespeare and Company, it was founded by a young American woman named Sylvia Beach.
32:19This is the fiction room going from floor to ceiling, literally.
32:37Sylvia Whitman is the current owner.
32:40There's a poetry nook in the corner.
32:42It's the perfect place for poetry and nook, isn't it? It is. It's quite romantic.
32:46What was Shakespeare and Company like back in the 1920s?
32:50Well, I wish I could go back in time. It sounds amazing.
32:55Sylvia Beach opened her Shakespeare and Company in 1919, and it was really a mecca for all of the great writers of the day.
33:03So she had Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, Ford Maddox Ford, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound.
33:11These are all people that would drop in. Everyone was there in the 20s.
33:14Did Hemingway himself used to come to Shakespeare and Company?
33:17Absolutely, yes. He actually described himself as Sylvia Beach's best customer and she didn't deny it.
33:25He was in Paris, I think they first met in 1921, and he was living here with his first wife, Hadley.
33:34And he was hungry, he was poor, he was unpublished, and he was working really hard on his writing.
33:41And he had a letter of introduction to Sylvia, and he turned up in her bookshop with that letter of introduction.
33:49But he didn't need it because instantly there was a warmth and an affinity between them that turned into a beautiful relationship.
33:57And it lasted, until he died, it lasted 40 years.
34:08By 1928, Ernest Hemingway was a Parisian old hand.
34:13A hard-drinking journalist, he was officially in Paris as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star.
34:27Hemingway wrote hundreds of pieces of journalism during his time in Paris, and these are just some of them.
34:34They cover a whole range of subjects.
34:36There is an interview here with Mussolini, whom Hemingway calls Europe's prize bluffer.
34:42There's another story here about a Paris to Strasbourg flight, and I love the way it begins.
34:48It begins, we were sitting in the cheapest of all the cheap restaurants that cheapen the very cheap and noisy street, the Rue de Petit Champs in Paris.
34:57And there's a story here about Hemingway himself being gored by a bull in Pamplona.
35:04But all of these pieces are written in this crisp, economical, journalistic prose that was tailored to being sent by telegram across the Atlantic.
35:17But Hemingway wasn't in Paris solely to write copy.
35:20He'd come here to turn himself into a world-class novelist.
35:25He wrote his first novel, The Sun Also Rises, in 1926.
35:30And by 1928, he was working on his second and perhaps greatest book, A Farewell to Arms.
35:37A Farewell to Arms is the story of a romance between an American ambulance driver and an English nurse during the First World War.
35:48Now, it is a powerful tale of love and violence.
35:52But what makes it so remarkable is its style.
35:56Take this passage, for instance, when the hero Frederick first meets the woman with whom he'll fall in love.
36:04Miss Barkley was in the garden.
36:07Another nurse was with her.
36:09We saw their white uniforms through the trees and walked towards them.
36:13Miss Barkley was quite tall.
36:15She wore what seemed to me to be a nurse's uniform, was blonde and had a tawny skin and grey eyes.
36:22I thought she was very beautiful.
36:26Now, what's amazing about that is the language is stripped back to the bone.
36:32The sentences are short, the words are basic and there is no room for sentiment whatsoever.
36:39You know, Hemingway famously wrote that prose is architecture, not interior decoration.
36:46And that idea, that style, came absolutely from his time as a journalist.
36:56As the novel develops, Frederick and Catherine fall in love.
37:00They escape the war.
37:02They live happily.
37:03She gets pregnant.
37:05But then tragedy strikes.
37:07It seems she had one hemorrhage after another.
37:12They couldn't stop it.
37:14I went into the room and stayed with Catherine until she died.
37:19She was unconscious all the time.
37:21And it did not take her very long to die.
37:26After a while, I went out and left the hospital.
37:30And walked back to the hotel in the rain.
37:33And that's it.
37:37That's the end of the entire novel.
37:40She dies.
37:41He leaves.
37:43And it's raining.
37:45And you know, it's the simplicity that makes it so unbelievably powerful.
37:50But the truth is, it wasn't simple at all.
37:53In fact, it took Hemingway 47 attempts to get that ending so perfect.
37:59For another group of Americans, Paris offered a more fundamental kind of freedom.
38:17During the First World War, hundreds of African American soldiers had fought in the trenches defending France.
38:30After the armistice, many of them drifted to Paris and fell in love with the City of Lights.
38:49Paris gave them opportunities.
38:51And in return, they gave Paris jazz.
39:03Today, the city still has a thriving jazz scene.
39:06I asked drummer John Betch why so many African American jazz musicians came to Paris after the war.
39:17It's very difficult for Europeans to understand the insanity of the racist climate of the United States back then.
39:35To be able to walk down the street and be called Monsieur instead of something else.
39:42To be able to walk down the sidewalk and not have to get off the sidewalk when a white person came towards me.
39:48Yeah, that was very attractive. Very attractive.
39:52Now in 1928, what was life like for an average black American musician in the United States?
39:59Segregation is really, really hard to understand in today's terms.
40:08Separate toilets, separate water fountains, you could be killed easily.
40:14And nobody would do a thing about it.
40:18What an astonishing thing. Back in the 1920s in the United States, they were nothing.
40:23They were treated like second class citizens.
40:25And here, they were heroes, they were superstars.
40:28Yeah, exactly.
40:30Exactly right.
40:38As African Americans found freedom, Paris seemed to embrace their music.
40:46The French even had a name for their new obsession.
40:50They called it Negrophilie, love of everything black.
40:56Jazz nights sprang up all over town, and it wasn't long before a star was born.
41:07One of the greatest performing artists of the jazz age.
41:11Josephine Baker.
41:12Born into poverty in St. Louis, Missouri in 1906, Josephine Baker, like many dancers in Paris, had escaped a difficult start in life.
41:31Josephine Baker had an eventful youth.
41:40She was married at the age of 13, but allegedly broke it off with a bottle of beer to her husband's head.
41:46Her second marriage, of 15, gave her the name Baker, but she abandoned him to become a performer.
41:55Her first job in Paris was advertised with the toe-curling line, come and see 25 Negroes in their natural state.
42:08Baker had no choice but to play along with it.
42:11But once on stage, she stole the show completely.
42:23She sent up the club owner's casual racism with a performance that was uninhibited, knowing and cheeky.
42:33Paris had never seen anyone dance with such inventiveness and freedom as Josephine Baker.
42:38They fell head over heels in love.
42:49But for an uneducated girl from the segregated South, her instant fame wasn't always easy to handle.
42:57Josephine had thousands of admirers and dozens of lovers, both men and women.
43:03But Paris was a difficult, even painful place for her.
43:08She was insecure, unsettled by her fame, and often lonely.
43:12And to keep herself company, she kept a menagerie of animals in her hotel suite.
43:17Rabbits, a snake, a parakeet, a pig called Albert, and eventually a tame cheetah that she gave a diamond-studded collar.
43:25Paris, Paris, Paris, Paris!
43:32Baker's eccentricity may have been born from loneliness, but Paris loved it and embraced her as one of its star attractions.
43:40She was allowed to set up her own club, become a French citizen, and she even worked for the French Resistance during the Second World War.
43:47Josephine Baker had more freedom here in Paris than in any other city in the world.
43:57And while, like many other black artists, she faced racial stereotypes throughout her career,
44:02it was here where she became one of the most original and distinctive artists of the 1920s.
44:07Baker's road to success had been long and hard fought, but the unique openness and tolerance of Paris had made it possible.
44:18And in return, she gave the city her loyalty and her love.
44:22.
44:44If most people in Paris seemed to be living for the moment,
44:47there were some who were more interested in the future.
44:53Architects and artists who wanted to build a better world, a modernist utopia.
45:02And they took their inspiration from the straight lines and smooth surfaces of the new machine age.
45:09The most enigmatic of these dreamers was a Dutch painter called Piet Mondrian.
45:25Piet Mondrian was quiet, meticulous, if you met him, you could even say boring.
45:31But he saw himself as a man with a mission.
45:34What he wanted to do was drag Paris, Europe, the entire world into a brave new age.
45:41And he thought the best way to do that was through painting.
45:45After the First World War, Mondrian came to settle in Paris,
45:50where he lived and worked in a squalid building in Montparnasse.
45:54But inside, his studio seemed to belong to a different world.
45:59This is an exact replica of Mondrian's studio in Paris, and just how it would have looked in 1928.
46:13What a space!
46:15Now, in the late 1920s, this was pretty much the most famous studio in all of Europe.
46:21It was a legendary place, and it was Mondrian's pride and joy.
46:27He planned every single square inch of this studio.
46:31The colour patches, the yellows and blacks and greys and reds, even the little mirrors were meticulously placed on the walls.
46:39The furniture was carefully chosen.
46:42And Mondrian even painted his paint box and his matchbox so they didn't disrupt from the overall colour scheme.
46:48Now, Mondrian was clearly an obsessive compulsive when it came to his studio.
46:54But that was for a reason.
46:56Because this, for Mondrian, wasn't just a place to live and work.
47:00This was his prototype for the utopia he was trying to bring to the entire world.
47:05By 1928, Mondrian had developed and mastered his great signature style.
47:25And one of his finest works from the period is this one.
47:28Now, this little picture is quintessential Mondrian, a square painting by an equally square man.
47:44Now, it looks pretty simple, but actually, Mondrian spent months on it, varying the thickness of the lines by fractions of millimetres,
47:50and experimenting with the different colours in different positions, until eventually he arrived at this.
47:58And what he arrived at is, to my mind, perfect.
48:02And it was meant to be perfect, because for Mondrian this painting was the portrait of a pure, timeless, universal reality.
48:10A reality that underpinned everything we see.
48:13And in order to reach that reality, in order to capture that reality, what Mondrian has done is distilled everything in the world,
48:22all its messiness, all its variety, to the most basic forms.
48:28And the most basic forms for Mondrian are the vertical line, the horizontal line, black, white, and the three primary colours.
48:37Now, why did he choose those? Well, for him, those forms were the ingredients of absolutely everything.
48:46With the colours on that canvas, you can make every colour, and with the forms on that canvas, you can make every form.
48:53The horizons, the trees, the buildings, the streets, masses, voids, even people.
48:57So for Mondrian, this painting was, I suppose, the cosmos in shorthand.
49:04The visual DNA of the entire universe.
49:06But as Mondrian was painting an ideal world, others were out building it.
49:29In the 1920s, around all of Europe, a new kind of architecture was emerging.
49:36An architecture that shared the same utopian, modernist spirit.
49:43And if this powerful movement had any one ringleader, it was a young Swiss architect, who called himself Le Corbusier.
49:52In 1924, Le Corbusier founded a small architectural practice in Paris with his cousin.
50:16And it was here that he began to devise a new kind of home.
50:22One that he was very happy to live in himself.
50:29Now, this is Le Corbusier's own apartment.
50:33He lived and worked here for most of his life in Paris.
50:36And it really showcases his idea of the modern home.
50:41For it couldn't be more different to the traditional, high-ceilinged, parquet-floored Parisian apartments.
51:04Le Corbusier thought homes should be machines for living in.
51:09And this one is a showcase for his new design principles.
51:14It's full of natural light.
51:17One whole wall is almost entirely made of glass.
51:22It's open plan.
51:24In fact, some of its most private rooms don't have doors at all.
51:27And every single feature is eminently functional.
51:39He even built this bed just high enough so he could look out at Paris when he was lying down.
51:44For Le Corbusier, this apartment was peaceful, practical, healthy, hygienic and beautiful.
51:56And he wanted to make sure that others could live this life too.
52:09But Le Corbusier was not content with changing one building at a time.
52:12He wanted to transform whole cities.
52:17And Paris was first on his list.
52:27He examined the city from every angle.
52:30He watched its inhabitants eating, drinking and cavorting.
52:33But where others had fallen in love with its beautiful buildings, elegant boulevards and quaint little squares, Le Corbusier saw a city on the verge of extinction.
52:45The city is crumbling and it cannot last much longer.
52:53It is unhealthy, antiquated, overcrowded.
52:57Surgery must be applied at the city centre.
53:01And we must use the knife.
53:03So Le Corbusier set to work planning a radical overhaul of Paris itself.
53:20A plan so radical that it would transform the city completely.
53:27So this is the plan for Le Corbusier's new Paris.
53:34And it was a new Paris because he basically hoped to tear down much of the city centre.
53:42A whole swathe of the right bank, which included parts of the Champs Elysees, were all going to be torn down.
53:48And he was going to replace it with this.
53:51A network of 200-metre-high skyscrapers with a huge superhighway connecting them all.
53:59Le Corbusier's plan is startlingly modern, perhaps more modern than anything that came out of Paris in the 1920s.
54:07Its sleek lines and high-tech forms seem to belong to the 21st century and beyond.
54:13Only the cars betray its real age.
54:16But his plan had a purpose.
54:18Now this was partly an attempt to save Paris, but it was also an attempt to make the city cleaner, healthier and more efficient.
54:29A city that was much more in tune with the 20th century itself.
54:33But all I can say is, thank God no-one let him do it.
54:39Le Corbusier may not have managed to change Paris, but his dreams for modern architecture and modern life
54:48have been a defining influence on the world we inhabit today.
54:52And those dreams were fuelled by Paris's audacious and optimistic spirit.
54:57Paris, in 1928, had been a truly exceptional place.
54:58Paris, in 1928, had been a truly exceptional place.
55:02Where people forgot the past, dreamed of the future, and lived in the moment.
55:03Paris, in 1928, had been a truly exceptional place.
55:07Where people forgot the past, dreamed of the future, and lived in the moment.
55:16This was a place where the surrealists let their imaginations conquer reality.
55:19Where painters, composers, and dancers found freedom to express themselves in dazzling ways.
55:22Paris, in 1928, had been a truly exceptional place.
55:24Paris, in 1928, had been a truly exceptional place.
55:26Where people forgot the past, dreamed of the future, and lived in the moment.
55:29This was a place where the surrealists let their imaginations conquer reality.
55:34Where painters, composers, and dancers found freedom to express themselves in dazzling ways.
55:47And where Europe's most ambitious dreamers fantasised about better worlds.
55:53After a devastating war, Paris had conjured up what was surely the most exhilarating party of the century.
56:08But 1928 would turn out to be the last hurrah.
56:14In the following year, the Roaring Twenties would be ended by one momentous event.
56:23The Wall Street Crash was reported in Le Figaro on Tuesday 29th October 1929.
56:33Now it didn't make the front page.
56:35It's actually this tiny little story on page three.
56:39And that's because to the French it must have seemed like a largely irrelevant piece of international news.
56:45But, for the thousands of Americans who lived here in Paris, it was catastrophic.
56:53American expatriates read the news with dismay.
57:00Their seemingly endless funds had all but vanished.
57:04And they queued up to leave the city.
57:09Almost overnight, Paris changed.
57:11The bars and cafes, once filled with carefree cosmopolitan customers, were now empty.
57:23But worse was to come.
57:27In the 1930s, the depression spread to Europe and France endured a bitter and protracted recession.
57:33In 1939, another world war started.
57:45And one year later, Paris, the city of joy and liberty, fell to the Nazis.
57:51Paris' reign as the world capital of the arts was arguably over.
58:06But as it and the rest of Europe recovered from the Second World War, another city, a very different city, would take its place.
58:14In the next episode, we explore that city, New York in 1951.
58:28Exploring the land of the panda here on BBC4 next this evening, while China continues in just a moment.
58:39in the 1960s.
58:41We'll see you again.
58:42In the next episode, we will see you again.
58:43When we were on BBC4 next morning, we are here on BBC4 next episode,
58:45We are on BBC4 next time, in the next episode of BBC4 next episode.
58:47That is what we recommended for.
58:48In the next episode, we look at the podcast, the time we found.
58:50And the updates we are here on BBC4 next day.
58:52This is a series of festival ticket films, that we are on CMS, and in the next episode,
58:54the European community, we were on the range of the northern world.
58:57That has been on the flight.
59:00A7th, a tour of the new destination, at the 1980s,
59:02we are on the coast of Bear.
59:04We are on the coastline, and we hope with this design.