Lycée George-Sand La Châtre

La Tour Eiffel

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 When we arrived in Paris, we visited the cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris.

We were lucky because there was an exceptional exhibition in the nave of the monumental « hearth-rug » which had been woven between 1825 and 1833. The exhibition was supplemented with a lot of liturgical clothes which had been offered to the cathedral in the nineteenth century by Charles X, Louis-Philippe et Napoléon III. The carpet was particularly impressive because it was used by several French sovereigns such as Louis-Philippe and emperor Napoléon III, it was also incredible because its surface is 200m2 !! Its design is wonderful, at once very colourful and filled with minute details ! So it’s an important object of our history and I enjoyed seeing it !

 Most of us had already visited this cathedral but each time we see it, we are impressed by the beauty of this monument wich represents one of the most important symbols of french history !

Notre-Dame

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  After the excursion in Notre-Dame of Paris, we went to the Cité de la Musique to visit the Europunks exhibition.

There was a strange atmosphere, because there was a lot of objects everywhere, it looked totally disorganized. There were posters, movies and clothes everywhere, and that was hard to find the meaning of this accumulation of objects. And all of those things were telling us about really strange subjects ( and sometimes about totally different subjects) ; this, in a movie they were talking about an oil slick in Bretagne, and I couldn’t understand why it was in this punk exhibition !

We were also shocked by all of these artefacts decorated with the svastika, or communist’s symbols, sexual explicit images, photos of collective suicides... There was also a music workshop with drums, guitars and all of the instruments that the punk artists used and we could play with all of those instruments and it was interesting. But I was also disappointed by the punk music extracts because they just shouted all the time, the songs were rather monotonous, without any chorus or chord change from the beginning to the end. So it’s not my type of music ! Then it was really strange and hard to understand, it’s an other world that they wanted to create but it’s not mine !!! Neverthless, I can understand that they wanted to be heard by the politicianss, that they were rejected by the society and that they wanted to add a lot of people on their cause to go together in an other fictive world !

An Anti-Flag that we could see at the exhibit.

 After the visit of European Punks, we went to the permanent vintage music instrument collection.

We could hear the sound of each instrument thanks to our audioguide. It was particularly interesting because we could hear a lot of improbable songs wich were played by strange instruments. I vividly remember some of them. There was a strange guitar with three necks, which in my opinion makes a more beautiful sound than the traditional guitar. There was also a really strange oboe wich was made with wood, and it was a wonderful sculpture representing a dragon which gives the oboe a splendid aspect with the sound exiting out of the mouth of the dragon.

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 The sound of the harpsichord impressed me because the music that they had recorded into the audioguide was very special and I couldn’t imagine that such music could be played with a harpsichord. Then we saw an alto violin player who explained to us the principle of her instrument ; she played excerpts of classical pieces for us. She also taught us the particularity of her instruments and I discovered that this was not as boring as I could imagine ! I also discovered that a lot of the music that she played sounded looked like the sound track of my favourite films (James Bond....)

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 Finally we went to the « Pixar 25 years of animation » exhibit in the Musée des Arts Ludiques .

We could see a lot of drawings which showed us how animation films were made. It was particularly interesting because we could see the evolution of the drawings, they showed us the different steps leading from the lead pencil drawing to the three dimensional image in colours. One of those pictures showed us something else : it was that the creators of the animations find a source of inspiration in nature. In this picture we could see that the artists use the forms of a bull to imagine a malicious combine-harvester, so the two drawings were superposed to find the perfect alliance between the two forms and it was wonderfull.The statues of pixar characters in a grey matter were particularly striking. They were made with minute details and I remember one of them which I particularly enjoyed, it was Gill’s statue ( Gill is the black and white fish in NEMO)

An exemple of those statues.

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The Zootrope which was a reconstitution of a short scene with real Toy Story characters in statues was really impressive. There was a platform which revolvedfast, it was about one rotation per seconde and it was combined with a stroboscopic light which gave us the impression that the characters moved as if it was a film !!! Then we saw a short movie about approximatly all the pixar’s films which were combined thanks to three video projectors ! So this exhibition was interesting but a bit disappointing because the leaflet that was distributed to us said that this exhibit was famous all around the world . In reality there was just the Zootrope which was exceptionally impressive but otherwise there were a lot of pictures and not many things else, it was a bit boring after going through 2 or 3 rooms with just a lot of those drawings. Nevertheless we could recognize Toy Story 1 storyboarding and it was interesting to see in reality an element that what we had worked on in class !

The museum by night !

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