Day Eight

I’ve breezed through the past few days far too easily. It’s time to once again test my French skills with today’s challenge.

Question one

Near this department store, several shots for a classic French film were illegally filmed without permission at the end of the 20th century.
What is the filming date of these stolen shots?

Add alt-text

We can use [images.google.com] to find that the image was taken the Galeries Lafayette in Paris, in the 9th arrondissement. It was pretty easy to find this given that the image for today is seen on the Wikipedia page: Dome and balconies of Galeries Lafayette store, lady section, in boulevard Haussmann, Paris, with Christmas decorations. This picture has a 170° field of view.

We need to find a film that was not allowed to film in or around the Galeries Lafayette, but did so anyway. It took a while for me to whittle down the search query to be useful.
After about an hour I settled on this one; authorise to film galeries lafayette site:.fr

Let’s go through the query section by section:

  • authorise to film - As this is another French-Language based challenge, I found that wording the query like this picked up more relevant articles.
  • galeries lafayette - Fairly self explanatory. We want to find an article that mentions filming in or around Galeries Lafayette.
  • site:.fr - We want to specify French websites here. I found that a decent amount of the articles without this would be in English and didn’t really have anything to do with a film of any sorts.

You’ll notice that I’m not specifying anything to always include by wrapping it in quotes. I had been wrapping ‘Galeries Lafayette’ in quotes for a while, but the query above gave me some actionable results.

On the second page of Google I came across this article for the film Le Père Noël est une ordure (Or, Santa Claus Is a Stinker). Translating this article into English gives us some very important information: Text reading: Gérard Jugnot, who plays Felix the violent and sociopathic Santa Claus that we love so much, had experienced some problems during the shooting of the scenes outdoors. At the very beginning of the film, he wears his shabby costume and makes a retap for a strip club in front of Galeries Lafayette. Except that the department store did not allow the film to turn in front of its building. It is therefore hidden in vans parked in front of the Galeries that Gérard Jugnot and the entire team of the film were waiting for the right moment. Once the lane cleared, all this little world rushed out of the vehicles to shoot the scenes as quickly as possible.

Seems that we’re on the right track!

The IMDB page for the film doesn’t list any filming dates. Annoying. I found the wikipedia page for the film which does further confirm that we’re on the right page.
Highlighted text from the above WIkipedia article that reads: The first scene of the film was really shot on the grand boulevards of Paris at Christmas time and without authorization from department stores. Gérard Jugnot, hidden in a van, went out for a few moments for the catches. The film crew then uses a code name: The tans celebrate

The film was released in August of 1982. A good way to add production value to a film is to use big real life events as a setting. Some people (like me) call this Shooting the Rodeo:

And ‘shooting the rodeo’ means there’s an event happening, and you film it, and you put it in your movie. And it’s instant production value because you didn’t have to arrange it.

Le Père Noël est une ordure appears to be a christmas movie. So it makes sense that it would have been filmed in December where they could capitalize on the Christmas decorations out in public. As it turns out, December of 1981 is the answer!

Conclusion

I’m starting to understand that when the questions focus on some French culture it’ll take me a lot longer to complete. There’s nothing wrong with that though, OSINT4Fun is a European/French based platform so it makes a bit of sense.

Anyway, another day under my belt. See you tomorrow!