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René Clair's contemplation of filmic movement versus stasis, a stylistic leap derived from Sennett that gazes toward Cocteau. The young watchman (Henri Rollan) wakes up in the clouds, down below is a mysteriously dormant Paris. The clocks have all stopped, the streets are deserted except for the occasional immobilized passerby: A vagabond slumped on a park bench, a gendarme about to seize a pickpocket, a luckless soul ready to leap into the Seine. A batch of passengers just in from Marseilles—a pilot, a tycoon, a Scotland Yard sleuth, a thief, a flapper—join him as seemingly the city's only mobile denizens, they all frolic amid tableaux vivant. They help themselves to wine, jewels and furs, then splash at the Place de Concorde fountain and play cards on the Eiffel Tower's spiral staircase. But "what good are riches when you're bored," franc bills eventually become paper planes tossed out the window as the men scuffle over the group's sole woman. Cinema as reverie, cinema as rhythm: Are the characters dreaming this petrified world, or are they the dream itself, the cavorting freedom projected by a slumbering city? The answer might rest with the filmmaker's proxy, Professor X (Charles Martinelli), a sort of blobby, absent-minded, benevolent cousin to Rudolf Klein-Rogge's Rotwang who can control the freeze-frame by flipping a switch (a soupçon of animation illustrates the process). A rich vein of fantasy and science-fiction, extensively mined over the years by Richard Matheson (I Am Legend), Buñuel (The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie), and more zombie movies and Twilight Zone episodes than can be counted. With Louis Pré Fils, Albert Préjean, Madeleine Rodrigue, Myla Seller, and Antoine Stacquet. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |