Paris qui dort

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.

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.

A watchman high on the Eiffel Tower awakens one morning to find everyone in Paris seemingly asleep, frozen in the position they were at 3:25 AM. He, and a group who had been high up in an aeroplane in the wee hours, frolic in the petrified City of Lights until the novelty wears out and they discover the cause of the mysterious phenomenon. The film is a charming silent directed by René Clair (one of his many fantasy films) and features fine old images of Paris in the 1920's (much of the story talks place on or around the Eiffel Tower) and some borderline surrealism, especially of people frozen in mid-action or having tea perched high on the iron girders of the iconic landmark. The version I recently watched on-line (about 55 min long) was a bit washed out - a high-quality copy would be worth finding. Note that there are several versions in circulation with various titles and lengths. A must see for fans of vintage fantasy films or of early French cinema.

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'...

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.