Paris qui dort

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.

What a stunner this little movie is. With fantastic panoramic shots of early nineteen-twenties Paris. Called originally, Paris Qui Dort, plus too, At 3:25 or The Crazy Ray, this early science fiction story is set in, around and on the Eiffel Tower and the empty city Paris streets.

A night watchman, waking up one morning, while sleeping on the top of the Eiffel Tower, finds the whole of Paris has fallen asleep, permanently, with only himself for company and roaming the empty streets in bewilderment. After a short while, he stumbles across a small group of other bemused survivors. They explore. They take advantage. They have fun.

Parisian born René Clair's (1898 – 1981), whose other works include À nous la liberté Entr'acte (1924 short), Under the Roofs of Paris (1930) and À nous la liberté (1931), short comedy is a work of vision that today's contemporary cinema makers seem to have taken notice. With post isolationist films as 28 Days Later (2002), The Omega Man (1971) and Terry "Dalek creator" Nation's 1975 BBC television adaptation of "Survivors", this, Paris Qui Dort, is a very fascinating early contender of the sci-fi genre.

Placed at the heart is a narrative of while the cats are away the mice shall play, with wonderful shots of a bygone city seen from far above and with moments of comedy, The Crazy Ray is a classic of immense importance to the genre of sci-fi magic. Seen as the very first science fiction fable Georges Méliès's 1902 Le voyage dans la lune (A Trip to the Moon) has set the trend for visionary art, with the silent era composing of some of the greatest artists: Chaplin, Keaton, Clair, Lang and Hitchcock. At 3:25 can be seen as a new and fresh beginning for said filmmaker René Clair and a bold step into the unknown, as sound was soon to take control and all but the greatest has superseded to dominate.

Paris Qui Dort is a true gem, and while the mice are at play I highly recommend that you freeze time and find a moment to explore this intriguing visual work of art.

This silent film took me by complete surprise and I could hardly believe this film was so advanced for this production in 1925. Henri Rollan, plays the role as a watchman on the top level of the Eiffel Tower in Paris, France and comes down into the city and finds people all sleeping and in suspended motion standing like frozen statues. It seems a certain scientist had discovered an invisible ray which could not reach people in airplanes or Henri who worked at the top of the Eiffel Tower. If you want to see how France looked in Paris in 1925, you will enjoy all the old cars and the 1925 fashions for men and women. By the way, this film is only 21 minutes long and went along as a second feature on a much longer film I purchased. Great film to view and enjoy.

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.

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.