Notre Dame Fire

Thank you! I will be tuning in!

Thank you Richard!!

I arrived in Paris the day after the fire and have too many heartbroken memories about my time there - people crying in the streets. I am pleased that certain sections are beginning to open and hope I’m still living when she is rebuilt.

Took me a while to find it on my TV listings. I expected it to be on at 6:00 pm Pacific time but it's airing here at 9:00 pm the same as Eastern time. Means I'll have to stay up past my bedtime to see the whole show. :)

Thank you, Richard. I'll be watching!

thanks -- we will record it to watch later. We are watching the Tour right now every evening on long recordings.

Thanks for the heads up.

Richard,

Thanks for the note. It's airing at 22:00 in this area and I'm watching it now.

I sure hope the reconstruction goes really well. It's such a beautiful and significant building. I can still remember how much in awe I was when I was inside.

Watching it now and remembering the evening I watched TV in horror from Sarlat not knowing whether the entire cathedral would be lost. Amazing footage of the fire!! Heroic firefighters!

Very triggering to watch. I will never forget that day. I stopped my lessons in all my classes and we just watched a stream of the events. My only complaint about the broadcast is the overdubbing. Why not just use subtitles?

I thought it was very good, for what it was -- mostly a tribute to the firefighters. I wouldn't really call it dubbing -- more like the voiceover translation you get in news broadcasts. It worked better for me than subtitles would have, less distracting. Subtitles were used in places but not for the interviews. Besides the firefighters' courage (at lower levels) and the care they took with decisions (at higher levels), I was impressed with the visuals of the fire itself. I guess I hadn't watched as much news coverage at the time, but the fire was much bigger and scarier-looking than I'd assumed it was.

Nothing about the cause of the fire or the missed opportunity to detect it earlier, nothing about rebuilding plans, but the program didn't purport to cover everything. Nothing about the role of the fireboat that pumped water directly from the river, as described in Elaine Sciolino's new book, The Seine: The River That Made Paris. I kept waiting for that because Sciolino's account was so powerful, but maybe the fireboat was a footnote in the whole story, or maybe they couldn't get someone to interview.

Something that struck me as odd, though, was that the Paris Fire Brigade apparently has a sketch artist who goes to fires and sketches things. They used graphics effectively to show the firefighters' movements around the building, but I don't think those were his sketches. Do American fire departments have sketch artists? I doubt it. Vive la France!

Perhaps overdubbing isn't the right word. I was thinking of "doublage" in French. You may be monolingual, but I am not. I would much rather have heard the actual French as I found some of their translations rather poor. Like it or not, some things are lost in translation.

I also found the sketch artist part fascinating.

I guess the program was meant to be a tribute to the firefighters. So it didn't get into issues such as whether the initial response to the fire could have been significantly quicker.

BTW, I was googling around and noticed that the official restoration website is now saying that it looks like the 2024 completion date probably is not going to be met, since resumption of restoration work has now been delayed until 2021.

I agree with Dick, for me, subtitles take away from watching the action. Although i speak French, i appreciate the translation, i don’t like subtitles.

Kent, thank you for the info on the completion dates. Good to know.

You know, as horrible as this fire was there is something exciting about the debut of the the refurbished cathedral. It gives us something to look forward to and it makes us all part of her history.