Does anyone know how they shot the very realistic scenes high atop the Eiffel Tower, with Zazie's uncle hanging from the beams? This was long before CGI, and these shots didn't look like mattes or rear projections.
shareIt has been some 40 years since I saw Zazie so I don't remember scene in detail. But just think of some old school movie tricks, without CGI or rear-screen. Take a small mockup set of Eiffel Tower railing-- modular pieces small and portable enough to carry in an elevator and assemble. Take up to the top platform of the Eiffle tower and set them up 6 or 8 feet above the floor of the platform and 10 or 15 feet back from the edge. Presto! You have the real scene of Paris hundreds of feet below in the background, and a closeup of the actor hanging from a railing (but he is actually just a few feet above the platform floor.)
Then have a shot taken from the ground looking up of a tiny figure hanging from the railing. Intercut with the closeup, but could have been filmed on a different day. Tiny figure...is it the actual actor, hanging with a harnass and cable that don't show? Is it a stuntperson dressed the same as the main actor? Is it a dummy? Lots of low tech ways to get high scenes.
I'm inclined to agree. Having seen a recent documentary on Harold Lloyd wherein the same methods were used (platform on top of existing buliding).
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While watching this I got the impression that the Eiffel Tower scenes were actually done using a variety of different techniques, including superimposing a foreground over a background.
You can see this sort of thing clearly in the scene where Albertine is blissfully riding her bicycle through Paris traffic - in fact she is obviously not even riding a bicycle at all in these shots, but is simply sitting still, nowhere near the traffic. Some of these same techniques go all the way back to the earliest pioneers of silent cinema.*
An interesting interview with Malle's co-screenwriter on the film, Jean-Paul Rappeneau, that's included on the UK Optimum release, discusses how Malle wanted to pay tribute to the unfilmable and "bastardised" use of language in Raymond Queneau's original novel by "bastardising" the language of images, using pastiches of filmic styles.
He wanted to use all of the cinematographic vocabulary available to tear apart cinematographic language just as Queneau had done with literary language. He explained to me that he wanted a catalogue of every cinematographic style, and then he wanted to use them all in the film. So then... A study of animation techniques, fast motion and slow motion... And these effects create an extraordinary poetry in the film.(Thank goodness for subtitles - I'm not that good with French dialogue.)
However they were filmed I found these scenes quite dizzying to watch as I don't like heights! So they were effective at conjuring Paris from a great height.
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The real fake was when he was at the very top of the tower. If he really was at the very top of the tower where was the camera shooting from and where did the water come from ?
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