Paris qui dort

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filmmaker René Clair and a bold step into the unknown, as sound was soon to take control and all but the greatest has superseded to dominate.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.

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.

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'...

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.