Paris qui dort

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.

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.

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'...

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.

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.