paris qui dort (d. rené clair)

Clair’s astonishing silent film was accompanied in Cinemateca by three musicians, Juan Chao, Ignacio Echeverría y Luna Roura. Their pulsating score contributed to the delirious spectacle of a film which feels like a precursor of the zombie movie. Seeing Clair’s deserted 1925 Paris triggered thoughts of Boyle’s 28 Days Later. The flip-side of urban modernity, all that teeming life, is the living dead, which is what happens to the city’s citizens when Clair’s mad professor flips the switch, meaning the whole city is frozen. Only those who exist in the skies retain consciousness. At first it seems the only person to escape the spell is the warden of the Eiffel Tower, who lives on its third floor, just before the tower tapers, high enough to escape the impact of the professor’s forcefield. Later that same morning, the warden comes across a group whose plane had been above the city, coming in to land just before the professor struck. The Eiffel Tower becomes a place of retreat for the warden and the collection of odd souls who landed at Paris airport. It is the other star of the show, a place from which the beauty of the city can be mapped, but also one of peril, as the survivors go slowly mad and fight one another. The tower is a symbol of modernity which contains within it the seeds of its own emptiness. For all the lightheartedness of Clair’s vision, and there are plenty of laughs, there is also something disconcertingly haunting about this vision from a century ago of the materialist and technological instincts which fuel the city’s constant, restless movement and expansion.