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Summary
The young keeper of the Eiffel Tower awakes one morning and, from his vantage point at
the top of the tower, finds that the whole of Paris is at a standstill. On descending
the tower, he finds the streets are filled with stationary cars and motionless people.
He meets up with a group of tourists who have just landed in a biplane at Paris airport.
Unable to explain what has happened, they waste no time profiting from their situation
- acquiring new clothes, jewels and wads of bank notes. But they soon grow tired
of their new-found freedom and return, bored, to the Eiffel Tower. There, they receive
a radio message from a girl, asking to be rescued. She claims to know what has happened
to Paris...
Review
Although lacking the maturity and stature of other silent films of the period, Paris
qui dort is nonetheless one of the most important films in the history of French cinema.
It is the first film of the great French film director, René Clair, and also -
although it was not seen as such at the time - the first ever science-fiction movie.
Although the science-fiction element of the film is pretty naïve by today’s standards
(apparently, the entire world can be knocked out by changing one coefficient in a quadratic
equation...), the film is years ahead of its time in terms of photographic technique and
comic performances, and it also manages to make some valid statements about human nature.
The scenes filmed on the Eiffel Tower are both daring and beautifully done, to the extent
that the tower becomes an important player in the drama. At the time, La Tour
was seen as a symbol of modernity and optimism, a beacon for future prosperity, whilst
echoing France’s great cultural heritage, and is hardly surprising that it should be the
focus for so many French films. (The symbolism has continued up to the present day.
Just look how often the Eiffel Tower crops up in films of the New Wave, for instance.)
Whilst the scenes filmed on the Eiffel Tower are easily the best of the film, there are
also some interesting shots of Paris and Parisian life in the 1920s. Most of the
film was shot out-of-doors, and we get to see a real biplane coming into land, external
shots of some famous monuments before the advent of modern architecture, and a
Paris swarming with horse-drawn carriages and classic motorcars (even in the 1920s, Paris
was a beehive of active). As a result, the film is an important historical record
as well as a fine example of early 20th century entertainment.
© James Travers 2000
Essay René Clair had acted, in films by Louis
Feuillade in fact, but the first film he wrote and directed, launching a long and estimable
career, is Paris qui dort (Paris, Which Sleeps), also known as The Crazy
Ray, and first released in the United States as At 3:25. It's the sort of thing
that seems lightly tossed off, as a lark almost, but actually the film, a short (and,
alas, shorter still in the U.S.), is a profound meditation on our sense of place and time,
that is to say, concepts allowing us to "get our bearings" and navigate reality. Clair
was twenty-five years old when he made it, and it's almost as remarkable as Alfred Tennyson's
English poem "Ulysses" (written at about the same age*) as a young man's attempt to grapple
with the burden of mortal awareness. It isn't a masterpiece, as Tennyson's "Ulysses" is,
but it's an auspicious piece of work.
The protagonist, Albert, is in fact a Parisian the same age as Clair. (Clair also was
a Parisian.) In a sublimely comical yet utterly natural moment, the comedy of which we
have yet to learn, the boy begins the day by stepping out from his work post onto a kind
of terrace, yawning. He is still, as we say, half-asleep. Where is he, though? At the
highest point in Paris; Albert is the night watchman on the highest level of the Eiffel
Tower. Albert looks down below--a position of command fitting the strength, the seeming
indomitability, of youth. But his life is about to turn upside-down and inside-out by
what he sees and hears: silence; peoplelessness; a vacant city. The absence of life. Here,
the silence of the silent film, rather than functioning as no more than a donée,
more than wittily contributes to our sense of what the boy is all of a sudden experiencing.
The resilience and resourcefulness of youth: Albert wanders the deserted city, adapting
to its features, rationalizing his ability to contain it, coping pluckily with its challenges.
He finally encounters a person frozen in time, a man hunched over a public garbage receptacle;
Albert pokes and laughs, and the comedy is great. What we see (beneath the play, beneath
the bravado) is Albert's anxiety in two dimensions, the existential and the social. His
existence, as he knows it, has been challenged; his play at being superior to this frozen-in-time
man he encounters, who wears a working-class cap that draws his close connection to Albert,
discloses his uncertainty in the new reality in which he finds himself. (From the jacket
pocket of a subsequent "frozen" figure, Albert pulls a handkerchief that he mockingly
whips up and down in front of the owner's face. He plays at mocking the man, but he is
really mocking the death that suddenly terrifies him.)
Our awareness of the economically depressed post-Great War conditions in Europe translates
Albert's uncertainty, his discomforting bewilderment, into desperation. The scavenger
at the trash can becomes a kind of mental image: a projection of the precariousness of
Albert's own economic state. But for his fortuitous (though marginal) job, for which he
likely qualified because of his youth, Albert could be this stranger. And more: the "frozen"
condition of the man enables Albert himself to take this in--a psychological fact we know
from the adolescent display of his defensive coping mechanisms. In normal reality, given
the callowness of his youth, Albert would not notice such a person on the street, let
alone identify with him. Viva Clair!
In a powerful way that has to do with his thematic interests here, Clair is making three
sociopolitical points: one, that young people normally live in their own minds, in their
own worlds, perhaps because they feel alienated from those older than themselves who seem
to have the power in the world; two, that the most marginal members of the working class,
however diligently they attempt to survive, are in constant danger of landing without
income onto the streets; and three, in a society, disparate people are connected in ways
normally they themselves might never realize. What Clair embraces here is more than a
postwar concern; it has to do with the course of France, the promise of France, post-1789
Revolution.
So much of this film is a mediation between public and private, between the sociopolitical
and the (psychological) individual. (It is, of course, Freud who earliest, and most brilliantly,
drew the connection between the two in nonfiction, although Freud himself correctly credited
playwrights and poets, as far back as classicism, as the real pioneers in this endeavor.)
Albert, the working-class boy who has heretofore been an individual in Paris--to widen
the reference, substitute for Paris any other specific locale--is no longer able to think
of Paris, solipsistically, as merely where he happens to be; now it has a separate reality
of its own, and one intimately related to him. For the first time, he is able to comprehend
how place locates and helps identify him; and, of course, time does no less. Albert is
no longer just being; despite his youth and his daily input of activity aimed at survival,
he is now in a position to consider better such things as his position in Paris, and the
widest reference of this consideration, which perhaps for the first time in his life he
is now able to take in, in both his existential and socioeconomic and political fragility--the
sum of his mortal condition.
Young people, after all, don't normally think about death (except as a poetical abstraction
that, unfortunately, leads too many of them to commit suicide) or about the end of their
productivity, hence, the end of their socioeconomic viability, except insofar as they
implement strategies for day-to-day survival. Albert has a job; therefore, it doesn't
occur to him that the contrary might come to be the case. One can always get a job, at
least in one's mind; so what's the problem? Young Clair confronts his young protagonist
(and himself) with the truth: Life is uncertain, shifting, unreliable. Circumstances change,
and for the worse despite attempts to "manage" reality by trying to affect those circumstances
to one's own advantage. In order to stabilize his new, foundationless life, Albert, settled
on a public bench, imagines the Paris he otherwise knows: a bustling metropolis. Cars
in motion become the visual key to this fantasy, given the current reality. This waking
dream, however disconcertingly, establishes the tawdry movement of automobiles as an indicator
of normally active reality. (This is done wonderfully well, too, in Mark Sandrich's 1934
The Gay Divorcée starring the pair who epitomizes modernity, Astaire and Rogers.)
Alice Liddell (obviously, a nom de plume) brilliantly essays the relationship between
Clair's film and the Surrealist movement and aesthetic (see the Internet Movie Database),
but in tandem with her reading, however greatly it surpasses mine, I insist on another
understanding of this film. Albert's attempt to reinstall his grounding sense of the reality
of Paris reveals for us, by indirection, the inability of his particular circumstance
prior to the current one afflicting Paris to locate him in a way that made him "safe"
in his own cultural, economic, social and political skin. When we prevail even to a limited
and immediate extent, in certain sociopolitical contexts we remain at risk.
For me, this is the most trenchant aspect of Clair's extraordinary film. Shoving the "frozen"
driver over, Albert takes someone else's car; the implication, for me, is that his daily
labor is insufficient for providing him with a car of his own. A very funny moment occurs
when others who have flown in from Marseilles check out the usurped driver's heartbeat.
Life-and-death: What could be more important? Here, it is simply the thing to do. The
privately airborne group includes a Scotland Yard detective, as yet unaware he has an
unexpected "case" on his hands, and a dairy merchant. Albert and these other "investigators"
determine this: All clocks in the city stopped at 3:25 a.m.; Albert's and the plane passengers'
altitude left them unaffected. Now part of an exploratory, and exploitative, group, Albert
enters a restaurant and relieves a "frozen" patron of her gold necklace in order to buttress
his sexual selfconsciousness with the luscious female member of the group. Taking something
of value that isn't yours, that ordinarily you wouldn't have taken: this encapsulates
the film's theme, disclosing the mortal awareness and widened consciousness pressuring
young Albert.
Underscoring the wider frame of reference is one of the Marseilles flight member's jovial
invitation, even to Albert, to attend the day's opening of the Bank of France and the
department stores nearby. Yes, this is more bravado and compensatory good spirits, for
it isn't apparent at this time that any such opening will ever again occur. It's a good
moment, therefore, to treat as equals those whom, as a capitalist, you disdain. Indeed,
given their shared predicament of being alive in a dead world, the group accepts Albert
into their fold. At his invitation, and to preserve their "alive" status by maintaing
a lofty elevation, they all mount the Eiffel Tower. By doing so, they are also fortifying
their sense of importance by identifying themselves with the nation (that the Eiffel Tower
represents) that seems somehow to have slipped out of their hands. With the city below,
the trick shots of their ascent constitute an amazing aspect of the film; after all, the
higher-ups are pursuing an actual position higher up, in defense against the social standing
they feel has slipped away. This is more than irony; it's sociopolitical commentary of
the most precise kind.
In this new setting, Freudianism kicks in; the men hover around the one young woman in
the group "like moths around a flame." Clair and his cinematographers, Maurice Desfassiaux
and Paul Guichard, capture her image as one of perfect, almost diaphanous beauty, while
at the same time establishing the subjective basis for their subsequent jealous quarrels
over her and, worse, general boredom. Sexual titillation counts, but it's no match for
the Paris they expected to find. This is more than humorous; what grounds you in reality
is more significant than what fills your reality with fleeting pleasure.
The circumstance of this film tests postwar hedonism to the limit. We summarily discover
the reason for the change in Paris: a scientist has sent out the ray that thus affected
reality. Our (now) unhappy group has petitioned him to undo the damage he caused, and
he complies with sufficient endeavor to deduce mathematically the ray's antidote to render
the non-intellectual petitioners "asleep" in their boredom awaiting the results. Unlike
Caligari, to which he undoubtedly refers, the troublemaker here proceeds by science, not
spirit, by (Freud again) guilt, not presumptuous prerogative. The presence of his helpful
daughter humanizes him and helps move the film's premising predicament from God's hands
to our very own. This in turn helps draw forth the theme of mortal awareness. The world
resumes. The scientist reverses the earlier stasis his experiments imposed, and the resumption
of normal movement accounts for wondrous images the idea of which François Truffaut
would call upon for Le nuit américaine (1973), where the shifted context
is the miracle of film action. (Weeks after writing a piece disparaging Truffaut's film,
I find myself now reconsidering it.)
Indeed, Clair's little debut--I must say I have seen none of the earlier animated short
films by Emile Cohl from which some say Clair's first film derives--looks ahead to subsequent
French cinema: Marcel Carné's Les visiteurs du soir (1942) and Jean Cocteau's
postwar work come immediately to mind. Intriguingly, however, these other films don't
necessarily engage the predicament in which Albert finds himself in the same way. Albert,
the invincible boy who leads everyone up the Eiffel Tower: what irony, here. Albert, the
night watchman, is surviving the onslaught of reality by the skin of his teeth, and Clair
employs fantasy to underscore the point. Like so many his age, Albert knows exactly where
he is; the time stoppage reveals to him, and to us, that he really doesn't know what he
thinks he knows. The painful disclosure of Clair's rollicking comedy is how vulnerable
we may be when we think otherwise-when in fact we even think nothing on the score.
Compare Paris qui dort to the sentimental It's a Wonderful Life (1946) by
Hollywood's Frank Capra, and you realize what a gem it is. All the changes in his circumstance--all
the changes in his Paris as he used to know it--underscore Albert's shift from existential
experience to mortal awareness and, in so doing, discloses, in retrospect, the psychological
basis for wartime and postwar French existentialism. (But one must draw the line somewhere:
It's coincidence that the first name of the author of L'étranger (1942)
is Albert.) In any case, Albert's mortal awareness is inflamed by the magical circumstance
that this wonderful film posits.
I am generous in my reading associations where I find clarifying relevance. Therefore,
I must quote Germany's Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who more than a hundred years earlier
may have had Clair's first film in mind: "Appearance is the process of arising into being
and passing away again, a process that itself does not arise and does not pass away, but
is per se, and constitutes the life-movement of truth. . . . [T]he particular shapes which
mind assumes do not indeed subsist any more than do determinate thoughts or ideas . .
. [T]hat which obtains distinctiveness in the course of its process and secures specific
existence is preserved in the form of a self-recollection , in which existence is self-knowledge,
and self-knowledge, again, is immediate existence." For me, this describes Clair's Paris
qui dort. But I ask: Isn't Hegel, more generally, also describing cinema?
* In Tennyson's case, the death of a college friend, his best friend in fact, prompted
the unexpected blast of mortal awareness. Whether something similar happened to Clair
would be interesting to pursue, but the history of France itself may have easily inspired
Clair's perspective.
© Dennis Grunes 2003
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