Filming in Ménilmontant, the 20th arrondissement of Paris
The old village is on a hill and its main street climbs 50 metres between the boulevard and rue des Pyrénées. Père Lachaise is on the lower slope.
What Ménilmontant looks like
The main street of the old village still climbs the hill it is named after. starts at place Jean-Ferrat, which is 54 metres above sea level. By rue des Pyrénées it is at 104. Since June 2006 cars can only go up it, and buses and bicycles come down.
Belleville and its hamlets were annexed by Paris in 1860 and most of these streets were laid out before that. Notre-Dame-de-la-Croix was built into the slope between 1863 and 1880, which is why there are 54 steps in front of the west door.
Higher up, place du Guignier was a passage until 1877, when rue des Pyrénées was cut through and the odd side came down. A stone building of the Paris sewer service stands on it with two green doors under the city's arms. There is a market twice a week.
A little further east, the Coptic church at 22 rue de l'Est is in what was an electricity substation. The lettering across the front used to read Compagnie parisienne de distribution d'électricité, Poste de Ménilmontant.
The hill tops out at rue du Télégraphe, named for Claude Chappe's telegraph of 1792. A plaque on the wall gives 128.508 metres, the highest point on the city's public land. These streets were laid on the park of the château de Ménilmontant, and a stone gateway with a carved head is still at 6 bis rue Saint-Fargeau.
Père Lachaise is on the lower slope. Brongniart laid it out in 1803 and it now covers 44 hectares. The main gate on boulevard de Ménilmontant is by Étienne-Hippolyte Godde and opened in 1825. Inside there are 4,000 trees and the avenues are cobbled.
Films shot in Ménilmontant
Albert Lamorisse shot Le Ballon rouge here in 1956, and much of what is in it has gone. The staircase on rue Vilin was cleared, along with the school and one of the two bakeries. So were the steep steps of passage Julien-Lacroix, where Pascal finds the balloon. The waste ground where the older boys corner him is the Parc de Belleville now. The flat at 15 rue du Transvaal is still there. So is the bus stop where rue des Pyrénées meets rue de Ménilmontant. Notre-Dame-de-la-Croix appears in several sequences and is still standing.
Paris, je t'aime, 2006
Wes Craven directed the twentieth arrondissement segment and shot it in the cemetery. Frances and William are in Paris before their wedding. They walk the cemetery paths arguing about whether he has any sense of humour. It comes to a head at Oscar Wilde's grave. She tells him she could never marry him and walks off. He runs after her, trips, hits his head on the monument and finds Wilde standing behind him. The segment is six minutes long. Jacob Epstein carved the tomb in 1912. The lower half of it has been behind glass since November 2011, so it no longer looks the way it does in the film.
What Ménilmontant can double for
Ménilmontant can stand in for a working quarter of an old French city built on a slope, a village that a city grew around and swallowed and a nineteenth century burial ground of cobbled avenues and stone family chapels.
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