Paris schläft

It's always nice to watch various films from a relatively long time ago in order to get a grasp of what set the standards for the discourses of today. "Paris qui dort" is a science fiction short which establishes several motifs of today's science fiction fancy.

Paris sleeps. People who were high above the ground, either in the Eiffel Tower or in an airplane come down to find a city almost frozen in time. Water, machines, regular things move, it's just that all the people are asleep. The characters then get to live their wildest dreams of freedom and riches until it just starts to not work out for them.

Some images, such as the initial main character's approach to a fountain, are immediately recognized as used in 28 Days Later... The sleeping people are often set in the same sort of not-quite-frozen, not-quite animated set-up that's later used in Dark City. It's interesting to see such images become inspiration for entire other works we recognize today.

Unfortunately, the short itself hardly feels able to stand on its own anymore. The initial shot of a static Paris has cars moving at the edge of the frame. The characters' own boredom unfortunately connects well with the modern audiences own. However, it's still creative and interesting enough to be worthy of recognition and to be respected for what it's done.

--PolarisDiB

This short feature had so much potential early on in the movie: just imagine - you wake up and the whole city is frozen, asleep in an ever-lasting dream and you're the only one who is not. You can do whatever you want, use all the riches in the world but how long will it last until you realize that living in the world and existing in it are two completely different things? Some people get tired of living very soon and the others are fine with existing their whole lives - it's what you can do with the time that you've got on this Earth that counts.

Sadly the movie doesn't explore the human nature in this movie much, instead shifting the focus toward sci-fi explanation of the phenomenon by the end of it and loses its grip where it could've been a good drama.

Fantastic camera work, some impressive shots of empty Paris and decent performances don't allow you to fall asleep along with the other Parisians in the movie but other than that it's an average body of work with just another promising premise wasted.

The most loveable of all silent masterpieces. It took years for Surrealism to finally mature in the cinema as a powerful artistic presence, as in 'Vertigo', 'Le Samourai' or the late films of Cocteau (of whom much of the imagery of frozen citizens in this is reminiscent). The official Surrealist films of the 1920s, with the exception of Bunuel's, were usually childish trickery, rather than a valid way of looking at, or undermining the world. 'Paris Qui Dort' is different, delicate, beautiful, elegant and funny, it turns reality inside out, making reality a dream, and dream a reality (see the wonderful sequence where the bewildered hero, having roamed through an enchanted Paris, can only find the 'real' city in his head).

It is such a lovely idea, the whole of Paris enchanted by sleep, except for those in the air. The hero, due to bad luck, has to live on top of the Eiffel Tower, already cut off from a social context, as with the 'Wizard of Oz'-like band of acquaintances he strikes up - an aviator, an English detective, a notorious criminal, an independent woman (it IS the 1920s!), a blustering tycoon, a mad scientist and his daughter. These are the kind of people who would see life as unreal anyway. The question is: is the city of Paris, with its social order of work, crime and play, dreaming of these outsiders, who play out its desires of independence, wealth, power, freedom; or is it the other way round?

For the Surrealists, there was no need to heighten life - it was strange enough as it was. By placing the picture-postcard Paris in a fantastical context; by emphasising the hidden geometry of the city and its buildings; by showing a city, built by people for people, without people, Clair suggests a sublimely suspended dream place, like Tir na nOg, where people never grow old.

Tellingly, the old human foibles - greed, lust, jealousy, ennui etc. - threaten to destroy the freedom of the new social order even as it subverts the old one based on those foibles. But Clair subverts this world anyway by revealing the power of film, as the Professor's power over life and movement is Clair's power over his cinematic apparatus, capturing a Paris that sleeps, that never has to die, or admit debilitating transience, by capturing it on his camera. It's only a dream, just as the cinema is a dream before we go back out into the rain, relationships, bills, health. Sometimes you wish time would stop, that the inevitability of progress, and its immovable corollary, decline, could be averted. Clair is the most beloved of the Surrealists, because he knows knockabouts and chases are far more eloquent than portentous, 'meaningful' images.

I caught this as part of the 2021 Virgin Dublin International Film Festival and I really enjoyed it. Hard to imagine it was made almost 100 years ago and the quality of the print used was top notch. It's a simple enough story of a small group of people roaming through a silent Paris. It's set over just a few days and there was a lot packed in for the relatively short running time (by today's standards) of about an hour.

When a man awakens from his nightly sleep and leaves his quarters atop the Eiffel Tower, he discovers all of Paris is empty. After wandering for a bit, he finds that the people haven't vanished, they are all frozen in place like statues. He joins up with a merry band of people that land in an airplane, and they have fun in the empty city. Eventually, though, things start to turn ugly, and they need to get to the bottom of what happened to the city.

This is an early version of films like I Am Legend, in the sense that one of the chief joys is seeing a normally bustling city like Paris devoid of movement. Clair managed several impressive shots of empty streets and parks, although the effect is broken occasionally by a moving boat or train in the distance. At only 35 minutes, there isn't a lot of time for things like plot development or deep characterization. The main point here is silly fun. The version I watched had the title cards in French only, but the story is clear enough from the on screen action that this doesn't prove much of a problem. This was listed in 101 Best Sci-Fi Films book.