{"id":14367,"date":"2013-10-05T03:12:59","date_gmt":"2013-10-05T02:12:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/?p=14367"},"modified":"2013-10-05T03:16:12","modified_gmt":"2013-10-05T02:16:12","slug":"paris-qui-dort-by-rene-clair","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/2013\/10\/05\/paris-qui-dort-by-rene-clair\/","title":{"rendered":"Paris Qui Dort by Ren\u00e9 Clair"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"paris.jpg\"<\/a><\/p>\n

A half-hour comic science fiction film made the same year as Clair’s much more experimental Entr’acte<\/em><\/a> (1924):<\/p>\n

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 \u2013 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…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Scenes of empty cities are always fun although the effect here is rather hit-and-miss when you glimpse distant cars moving down the streets. The film has French intertitles but the copy at Ubuweb<\/a> includes a translation. The idea of using temporary stasis to commit robberies reminds me of Arthur C Clarke’s short story All the Time in the World<\/em> in which someone uses a time accelerator to plunder the British Museum. The story was filmed for American TV in 1952, and may be watched here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Previously on { feuilleton }
\n\u2022 Entr\u2019acte by Ren\u00e9 Clair<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A half-hour comic science fiction film made the same year as Clair’s much more experimental Entr’acte (1924): 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 … Continue reading “Paris Qui Dort by Ren\u00e9 Clair”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[7,20],"tags":[4231,5261,119],"class_list":["post-14367","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-film","category-science-fiction","tag-arthur-c-clarke","tag-rene-clair","tag-ubuweb"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pq7rV-3JJ","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14367","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14367"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14367\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14367"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14367"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14367"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}