Director Greta Schiller has been interested, throughout her career, in making documentaries composed of archival footage that investigate lost or overlooked aspects of history (her other films include Before Stonewall and Sweethearts of Rhythm, the story of an all-female, interracial jazz band from the '40s). Together with writer and historian Andrea Weiss, she's produced a film about one of the most discussed and investigated periods of literary history--the '20s, the period of "the lost generation." ("They didn't seem lost at all," comments Janet Flanner, for years the New Yorker's Paris corespondent. "They knew exactly where they were going--straight to Paris.") By focusing on the work and lives of the female artists and intellectuals drawn to Paris in the '20s, Schiller and Weiss have produced a film that seriously considers the contribution of women to Modernism, a movement mostly dominated by men.

American artists, male and female, were drawn to Paris by the strength of the dollar between the wars, the availability of good food and wine (especially alluring during Prohibition), and by its reputation as a haven for artists. But women, in particular, were attracted to Paris because they believed it was a place where they could live in whatever way they wished. Parisians were tolerant (Gertrude Stein said they were busy living their lives so that she was free to live hers), and those women who wished to live in a free and unconventional manner seemed to find the place irresistible. Most of the women Schiller tracks in her documentary were lesbians; most were also displaced Americans. Though Schiller may be guilty of skewing her history a bit in favor of expatriate lesbians, it's hard to fault her, since their stories are so interesting, and their motivation for emigration to the Left Bank of Paris, where unconventionality seems to have flourished in conservative times, seems so clear.

Most famous of these expatriates was Gertrude Stein, who was known at the time for her collection of modern art and weekly salons. Stein served as mentor for Picasso, Hemingway and Sherwood Anderson, influencing their work heavily even as her own writing remained unknown. If Gertrude Stein were alive today, she would probably be some sort of major media figure--her presence, even on the scratchy home movies that Schiller unearthed, is magnetic. With her cropped hair, deep voice and matronly dresses, Stein is the most seductive presence in the film, spinning off quotable lines and tramping through the countryside with her "great companion," Alice B. Toklas.

Also featured in the film is Sylvia Beach, owner of Shakespeare and Co., a bookstore that became the center of expatriate intellectual culture at the time. Schiller has located some great black-and-white footage of Beach taken in the '60s, where she breezily recounts her early literary adventures, including befriending the young Hemingway, who insisted on taking her to sporting events. Beach championed the work of James Joyce and published Ulysses when no one else would touch it. (It was considered obscene.) Later, Joyce broke their contract and sold the rights to Random House without giving Beach a penny.

Other, lesser-known artists like the tortured Djuna Barnes and the heiress/poet Natalie Clifford Barney are given serious attention in this film, along with photographer Gisele Freund and painter Marie Laurencin.

The coming of World War II quashed the spirit of Paris' community of artists, but Greta Schiller's film presents a fine chronicle of those who once considered the city neither a mistress nor a muse, but a haven where they were free to think and work.