Majestic inactivity

To be stranded on the Eiffel Tower is still to be stranded. In the 1923 silent film Paris Qui Dort (Sleeping Paris), six characters find themselves stuck atop the 19th-century architectural marvel after the world below is affected by a mysterious ray at 3.25 am that has frozen everyone in its reach. French filmmaker René Clair dreamt up his debut feature close to 100 years ago but it is freshly apposite now as we stay indoors and isolated to ward off the novel virus. In this screen fantasy, as also in life, the strange new circumstances put human nature to the test.

The protagonist, a guardian of the attraction’s observatory, wakes up and climbs down to discover people paralysed in their tracks. On traversing many eerily empty streets, he meets the only other conscious humans — five tourists who flew into the city in the wee hours. As it happens, the invisible threat in their landscape is a laser beam, and not a fast-spreading pandemic, invented by an overzealous scientist. Still, the group acts in ways that will speak to the quarantined viewer’s soul.

They remain on the tower’s observatory in fear of what lurks beneath. When they do venture out, it is to look for food. Not much is available but the deserted Place de la Concorde, the Opera House, the Notre Dame, and “all the world” is theirs. Elation turns quickly into despair and anger. They tire of one another, crave contact from outside, get so bored they tear up money to make paper planes. The only woman among them unluckily becomes the subject of jealous pursuit.

In the post-First World War Paris where all this is happening, deprivation and opulence co-exist. It is an indictment of the inequalities built into society and made normal. One of the immobile men is shown rifling through rubbish bins. Another, fortunately zapped just as he was about to take his life, clutches a note blaming “the terrible pace of modern life” and “the rush and roar of this city”. 

Equally, there are people frozen amid cheery conversation, dressed in finery at an upscale restaurant in Montmartre, which our protagonists are able to enter only because it is at a standstill.

Paris Qui dort is uniquely outdoorsy for a silent film, showing off Paris

The rest of the tale — how will the group reverse the ray, and will they want to? — plays out in scattered, oversimplified fashion. It helps to remember that this imperfect film was made by a wildly creative 25-year-old. Originally released as a 75-minute work, in Britain it was shortened to a little under an hour, and many years later Clair would edit it down to just 30 minutes.

So far, inferior copies of the film floated on the internet but three weeks ago a pristine 4K restoration — by the magicians at L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory in Bologna — was released for free on the website of Cinémathèque Française. Paris Qui dort is uniquely outdoorsy for a silent film, showing off Paris. Cinematographer Maurice Desfassiaux’s camera travels mesmerisingly up and down the Eiffel Tower.

“The great iron girl”, with whom Clair had always been in love, is admiringly framed in his short documentary La Tour too, made in 1928 when the tower was still the world’s tallest building. This title, also available for viewing on the Cinémathèque website, could easily be a precursor to how documentarian D A Pennebaker shot the New York City skyline in the 1953 Daybreak Express.

Clair seems to have been one of those irritatingly competent people. He dabbled in poetry, quit journalism, acted a little, wrote most of his films, and directed in his country as well as in the UK and Hollywood. He transitioned sceptically to sound film from the silent era but made versatile works in both forms: the wordless experimental film Entr’acte, a silent comedy The Italian Straw Hat, the musical À Nous La Liberté depicting the indignities of assembly line labour even before Chaplin’s Modern Times, the Agatha Christie adaptation And Then There Were None.

Not remembered enough anymore, this remarkable figure of early French filmmaking is worthy of being watched again. Make an evening or two of it while the city is still asleep.

ranjita.ganesan@bsmail.in