París que duerme

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 watchman on the top level of the Eiffel Tower comes out to find the whole of Paris asleep and frozen into position, drivers in their cars, passers-by, policemen just seconds before an arrest. He joins up with a group of people who were flying over Paris when it happened, to enjoy newfound freedom without limits.

One way to view this is as conceived; a comedy by way of surrealism and the absurd so far as the premise is concerned, and mostly harmless execution. A scientist is responsible we discover, who has devised a contraption that controls the flows of reality.

Or you can read between the images. I study what it means to meditate and effective conveyance of this through cinema, so this rings loud and clear to my eyes.

So we have the narratives that make up the bulk of day-to-day life arrested, doesn't matter how, and only those who were above ground spared from the effect. They walk through a still world full of possibilities for reflection, the only ones 'awake' among sleepers dreaming their routines. Of course being ordinary human beings, what do they do? They drink and dance, they indulge themselves, and when boredom sinks in, they fight for the one woman in their company. Narratives are resumed and stopped again, as the scientific mastermind, someone who is trying to master mind, tinkers with the equations.

The quest is for a still center, discovered in the arms of the woman.

It was perhaps too early in the medium to add further layers, for instance to link control of reality with the mind desiring images or desiring escape from them. Maybe, if this was Epstein's film who had by then stumbled on a theory about the eye in motion. It is fine to have just this at any rate, concerned more with visual invention than introspection. There are guerilla shots from inside moving cars, frozen and resumed, that do Nouvelle Vague thirty years early.

If you are an imaginative viewer, you will want to see the first half with its eerily empty boulevards and plazas, and imagine a silent horror film about some unspecified apocalypse.

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.

One has to love these early shorts -- look at the freedom that existed to film more or less whatever subject crossed the artist's mind. And at the self-reference: in the narrative, the characters have the freedom to do more or less whatever crosses their minds. The film itself is the work of a 'mad scientist' about the experiment of the mad scientist within.

The construction is both simple and deeply abstract: we begin with a lone figure against the backdrop of Paris architecture, which grows increasingly populated by statuesque mimes, who are manipulated by animated mimes. The movie ends when the level of abstraction is removed.

Clearly what have here is a work that is conceived from start to finish as a visual story...something so influential that has survived the test of time, in ways that so many other 'experiments' did not. Modern borrowings from this are found in 'Devil's Advocate', 'Dark City', 'Abre Los Ojos/Vanilla Sky'...

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