Do you know The Truman Show? The film in which Jim Carrey as Truman Burbank is the unaware protagonist of a reality show that started with his birth and goes on as if it were normal life? In that film everything we see is fake. The sky, the sea, the streets, the houses are all props.
Now, for a second, think if your reality was like that if behind the facades of every building there was nothing but the supports that prevent it from falling.
A few years ago Maxime and Claire, a photographer and videomaker duo better known as Ménilmonde, imagined not a small neighborhood or a street, but the whole of Paris as a huge film set.
As Maxime recounts on his site, the idea came while he was waiting for the bus in rue Louis Braille, a street that presents at the beginning and at the end two particular triangular buildings that, seen from a certain perspective, give the illusion that there is only the façade.
So, with a work that combined photography, photomontage and video editing, they created “Apparences” a video that takes us around a Paris made only of facades and supports. As on a real film set, only the elements useful for shooting were left of the buildings and monuments. Why build an entire building when you only need the windows, why build the Eiffel Tower when with half of it and the right shots it will seem finished?
