Iron Lady, Tower of Babel, symbol of Paris, hymn to the modern world or the most recognized monument all over the world, the Eiffel Tower has played an important role in cinema from its beginning.

Eiffel Tower Background Information

 The Eiffel Tower was selected from among 107 projects to highlight the Universal Exhibition of 1889. Fifty engineers and draftsmen worked hand in hand with 132 workmen during 2 years, 2 months and 5 days to complete this 300-meter tall structure. It was named after its constructor Gustave Eiffel, an engineer specialized in metallic bridge and aqueduct construction. It was built like a giant erector set; the components were prepared in Eiffel's workshop and then riveted on site necessitating 2,500,000 rivets for 18,038 pieces of iron. There was not one single fatal accident during construction.

 The monument was inaugurated on March 31, 1889 and on that very day, Gustave Eiffel climbed the 1,710 steps to raise the French flag atop. The Eiffel Tower was the highest edifice in the world until 1929, when the Chrysler Building (319 m) was opened in New York.

  Ten years after the Exhibition, the tower escaped deconstruction because of its communication values, especially the wireless telegraphy. It played a major role during WWI and enabled television broadcasting to see the light of day. Today the Eiffel Tower broadcasts programs from six television and eight radio channels. More than 150 million people have visited the monument during its lifetime. (1)

The Pioneers of Cinema

During the same turn-of-the-century period, Auguste Marie and Louis Jean Lumière were in the process of pioneering cinematography and it was six years following the inauguration of the Eiffel Tower that the brothers patented their invention of a combined camera and projector operating at 16 frames per second. It was also in 1895 that they opened the world's first cinema in Paris to show their films. In 1897, the Lumière brothers gave top billing to the Eiffel Tower in Panorama Pendant l'Ascension de la Tour Eiffel/Panorama Whilst Climbing the Eiffel Tower. Another pioneer in cinema, Georges Miliès, filmed the Tower in Images of the 1900 Exhibition.

  It was then the master criminal viliain-hero of a series of pulp novels, Fantomas, who became the master of the Eiffel Tower. Louis Feuillade brought the character to the screen in a series of five action serials starring René Navarre during the years 1913 - 1914. The international popularity of these multi-episode films influenced the serial trend in American films.

"Cinema and the Tower thus formed a legitimate couple, both offsprings of mechanical art and having a relation with riveted architecture - one with its bolts and the other with its splicing - for everlasting public enjoyment." (2)

The Avant-garde gave Stature to the Tower

  With the avant-garde approach, the Tower took on an added prestige in fragmented sequences and low-angle shots accenting its structure. The Eiffel Tower became a new symbol of modernity and advanced technology. In 1923, René Clair drew from science in a 35-minute fiction entitled Paris Qui Dort/The Crazy Ray where a scientist puts all of Paris to sleep and only a handful of men and women escape the fate by finding refuge in the heights of the Eiffel Tower. The Tower became a mythical and magical place up in the sky, and a maternal comfort protecting the protagonists of the film. In 1928, the documentary short La Tour, also by René Clair, magnified the construction exploring all possibilities with the camera. One could call it a statement of love for the Tower.

  Abel Gance also sought out the estheticism in extravagant camera frames in La Fin du Monde/The End of the World (1930), while Julien Duvivier entitled his 1927 fiction film Le Mystère de la Tour Eiffel.

Romance, elegance and French gastronomic connotations

  There was also the "Lubitsch Touch." Ernst Lubitsch, born in Berlin, was a tremendous success in Hollywood by the late twenties. In 1939, he scored one of the greatest triumphs of his career with Ninotchka. Russian comrade Ninotchka (Greta Garbo) arrives in Paris on a mission, meets a suave Frenchman (Melvyn Douglas) on her way to the Eiffel Tower and the beginning of their sentimental adventure is developed at each level of the Tower.

Other than a brief panoramic view looking down from the Tower, Paris and the scenes on the Eiffel Tower itself were shot in studio. And their famous champagne toast associated champagne and the Tower forever. Years later, Billy Wilder, screenwriter for Ninotchka, expressed how Hollywood adapted the fade in - fade out from a champagne bottle to the Eiffel Tower every time a film had a scene in Paris.

  In 1942, Casablanca by Michael Curtiz once again kindles a romantic story in Paris, and, even though a distant image in the film, the Eiffel Tower is there.

After the war: scene of the crime

  Burgess Meredith adapted a Simenon police story for the screen in 1949 starring Charles Laughton as Detective Maigret. In The Man on the Eiffel Tower, the murder takes place on the Tower and the investigation brings the detective back to the scene of the crime in search of clues. In 1951, the comedy The Lavender Hill Mob sets Alec Guinness in the role of a timid bank clerk. He comes up with the perfect scheme for robbing a gold bullion truck and to get it out of the country, by means of a business manufacturing models of the Eiffel Tower as tourist souvenirs - for who will notice if the consignment is actually made of gold? Charles Crichton directed this film that won an Oscar for Best Story and Screenplay.

Truffaut and the Nouvelle Vague

   Well incrusted in the spirit of François Truffaut, the Eiffel Tower was visible from two different apartments he lived in as well as he supposedly had an impressive collection of miniatures. Quatre Cent Coups/The 400 Blows opens with a shot of the Tower as well as A Bout de Souffle/Breathless, the first feature film by Jean-Luc Godard (Truffaut collaborated on the script), both of which were screened in 1960.

  And even if the Tower was not present in the film, Truffaut used it symbolically in the poster. For Baisers Volés/Stolen Kisses and Le Dernier Metro/The Last Metro, the Tower is present on a distant horizon as a sort of fundamental identifying symbol. The poster for L'Homme Qui Aimait les Femmes/The Man who Loved Women creates the illusion of the base of the Tower to the legs of a woman, while Vivement Dimanche/Confidentially Yours shows Fanny Ardant on the defensive with a miniature Eiffel Tower in hand.

  Also in 1960, Louis Malle took a more burlesque childlike approach to the tower with Zazie dans le Metro/Zazie in the Underground. The young Zazie descends the Tower's spiral staircase four steps at a time, humanizing the geometric structure.

And on and on...

  From Jacques Tourneur's panoramic scene of the Tower in Berlin Express to Claude Chabrol's Les Plus Belles Escroqueries du Monde/The Beautiful Swindlers (L'Homme qui Vendit la Tour Eiffel/The Man Who Sold the Eiffel Tower episode) or José Giovanni's Le Ruffian in which Lino Ventura commits suicide at the Tower, French filmmakers have either given the Eiffel Tower an active role in their films, or at least a symbolic one.

And even if Hollywood recreated their own version of the symbolic Tower at their studios, the real Eiffel Tower was definitely present in The Hostage Tower (an attempt to take the mother of the president of the United States hostage), or James Bond in A View to a Kill, or Superman II...

  Whether feminine or phallic, dramatic or romantic, modern or geometric, reaching for the heavens or Paris at its feet, the Eiffel Tower has had a continuous role in this century's cinema production.

How to put the Eiffel Tower in your film

  The Tower press office receives more than 200 propositions per year - photos, TV programs, films and advertisements combined. Most of these requests seek to use the Eiffel Tower symbolically in the background, and only about 2 - 3 films per year seek to shoot sequences directly on the Tower itself. The demands are decreasing as the tendency to rely on the digital studio is growing; for example, the bunjie jump off of the Tower in An American Werewolf in Paris was executed in the digital studio.

In general, the Eiffel Tower by day is in the public domain and posses no filming rights, but the Eiffel Tower by night, when all lit up, is copyrighted in France and in the USA. There is no charge when promoting the Tower in any general information document; it is free when a TV announcer places himself in front of the Tower in a symbolic gesture, such was the case during the World Cup 1998.

  Fiction films however are required to pay a daily fee of 25,000FF for all scenes shot on location. The same fee applies to all single background appearances of the Eiffel Tower at night in any fiction film. When shot on location, technical fees are added for security assistance, private elevator (6,000FF), electrical connections (3,500FF), and lighting of the Tower during off-hours (20,000FF).

  All propositions should be sent to the Documentation Department:

Société Nouvelle d'Exploitation de la Tour Eiffel (S.N.T.E.)
Champ de Mars
75007 Paris, France
Tel: 33 1 44 11 23 99
Fax: 33 1 44 11 23 98
E-mail: courrier@tour-eiffel.fr
Web: www.tour-eiffel.fr

Article by Carol Shyman

(1) Extracts from a document by Société Nouvelle d'Exploitation de la Tour Eiffel (S.N.T.E.) 1995

(2) Les "Ecoles de la Tour" by Jacques Stiévenard