Icarian Cinema: Paris qui dort

In a powerful study that sees in Paris qui dort the seeds of revolutionary cinema Annette Michaelson remarks that the analytic propensities of the medium, taken up in Epstein, Eisenstein, and Léger, “find their most concentrated and elaborate expression in the work of René Clair and Dziga Vertov” (1979, 41). The two cineastes brought forward an educational program of cinema responding to Walter Benjamin, Elie Faure, and Albert Einstein, three visionaries who desired to have film serve the ends of classroom teaching and to revitalize pedagogy of traditional disciplines. They wanted, perhaps, to bring cinema into classrooms decorated with instructive wall maps. Einstein, she adds, felt that cinema would be a boon to geography.

By means of the school film, supplemented by a simple apparatus for projection, it would be possible firstly to infuse certain subjects, such as geography, which is at present wound off organ-like in the form of dead descriptions, with the pulsating life of a metropolis. And the lines on a map will gain an entirely new complexion in the eyes of the pupil, if he learns, as if during a voyage, what they actually include, and what is to be read between them.²

In its “cascade of subtle gags” Clair’s film becomes a “topography of a great city” in which scale and pace are a function of temporality grasped as “movement in space” (Michaelson 1979, 35).

A casual reading shows that the film maps out a history of modernity born in the invention of cinema. Louis Lumière had made a tracking shot from the Tower, and so also did James White. These memories seem present in Clair’s feature. If, as Georges Sadoul has noted, the Eiffel Tower was the true “star” of Paris qui dort (1968 [1949], 196–97), its presence as character (or even prosopopoeia) of modernity is due to the invocation of recent memory of early cinema and the aftereffects of the Exposition. As of 1889 the Tower quickly became a ground zero of French history: in its design as a dazzling and overwhelming metallic erection it occluded the political presence of the French Revolution felt in the shockwaves in Paris at regular intervals in the nineteenth century (1830, 1848, 1871). Its ironwork obelisk was to commemorate a new and immaculate beginning (Ferguson 1995). An economic revolution and a utopian space were to be born at the site of the Tower. And with the Tower came the opening the Metro and the advent of new maps of the city and monuments laced with lines indicating subways completed and under construction.³ The early films showed that the Tower could provide “not merely a general, panoramic view of the landscape but, in a manner grasped and fully exploited by Clair, a machine for the generation of infinite compositional variations” (Michaelson 1979, 57). The environs of the Tower, seen in tracking shots through a maze of girders resembling a lacework of rhumb lines, or in takes of characters sauntering through constructions of girders, became a city-view in movement and atmospheric flux.

The film has a particular affinity for cartography in its attraction not only to the tradition of Feuillade and French cinema of the First World War but also, no less remotely, to the beginnings of the medium. The historicity of Paris qui dort—the degree to which it makes clear its own relation to the development of the medium—shares much with a pertinent trait of the atlas in general. Most atlases preface their maps with images or textual information about creation. They arch back to the beginnings of life (“as we know it”) and the subsequent natural and human histories of the world giving rise to its cartography.⁴ Paris qui dort does just that in an atlas-effect felt in its jumps and gaps in time that affirm its allegiance with the beginnings of the medium. Clair admitted that he had wanted to exploit cinematic effects of movement to an absurd degree. The camera would paralyze urban space and its play of stasis and movement. It would offer “a truly fresh vision of an other, marvelous world” (Abel 1984, 380). The other world had been one familiar not only to Edison and Lumière but also to Jean Durand in his Onésime series, shot at the Gaumont Studio, notably Onésime l’horloger (1912), a film that uses time-machines to accelerate the duration of the life of its protagonist.⁵ Clair recalls Durand’s film but, beyond its trick effects, the memory is filtered through the realistic takes and tracking shots recalling Lumière and a narrative that would be associated with the oneiric tales of Méliès.⁶ The effects of the latter are made through the style of the former. No concession is given to special effects: the fantasy is engineered in daylight, in the streets of Paris, “at the intersection of two supposedly antagonistic traditions that all of a sudden happen to be complementary” (Billard 1998, 80). If Clair’s recollections about the origin of the idea of the film are trustworthy, he was wishing to study how power could be afforded to those owning an icarian point of view on the world.

Paris qui dort has appeared in at least two versions. One is a thirty-five-minute “digest,” accompanied by piano music on a soundtrack, which Clair made in 1971 from material he recovered from earlier work that is now appended to the Criterion Collection edition of Sous les toits de Paris. Another, closer in form to an original feature of over an hour’s length, is composed of 1,480 meters of film and presumably is the matter of most sixteen-millimeter prints and videocassettes.⁷ In 1929 a sound version, conceived to be a partial talkie, was planned but never completed (Billard 1998, 80, 84). The restored copy in the Criterion Collection tends to be a summary or even an interpretation of the longer version. More sparing in its use of intertitles, its effects are less textured and choppy. The newly digitized version invites the spectator to follow the narrative at the expense of engaging its detail.

Both the print from the Museum of Modern Art and the video copy carry copious subtitles in English that attest to the appeal made to a public outside of France. The floral design in the borders of the subtitle bear on its cartographic latency. At a lower corner in the title is a globe, perhaps a memory of the sphere adjacent to the Eiffel Tower at the time of the Universal Exposition, replete with the lines of the tropics, colures, and meridians. Its face wears an expression fitting the content of the printed remark in the field above. Now the world smiles, then it is perplexed, saddened, or aggrieved, and yet again glows with joy. Every time the intertitle recurs, the homuncular globe reflects on the state of the world at large. Although the setting in the film itself is limited to Paris, the intertitle “globalizes” its action, thus bringing forward, albeit unconsciously, Ptolemy’s grounding distinction between cosmography and topography.

Geography is a representation in picture of the whole known world together with the phenomena which are contained therein. It differs from Chorography [or topography], selecting certain places from the whole, treats more fully the particulars of each by themselves—even dealing with the smallest conceivable localities, such as harbors, farms, villages, river courses, and such like. . . . The task of Geography is to survey the whole in its just proportions, as one would the entire head. For as in an entire painting we must first put in the larger features, and afterward those detailed features which portraits and pictures may require, giving them proportion in relation to one another so that their correct measure apart can be seen by examining them, to note whether they form the whole or part of the picture. Accordingly therefore it is not unworthy of Chorography, or out of its province, to describe the smallest details of places, while Geography deals only with regions and their general features.⁸

The distinction is present in the way the world, seen in the title cards, relates to the city. It bears on the economy of the film insofar as the distinction rehearses the local-and-global operation that Meliès and Lumière had conceived in order to assure a worldwide distribution of their commodities. The subtitles are especially effective in their suggestion—averred later in the film—that what is happening in Paris could also extend to the world at large. Between the intertitles and the portrayal of Paris is contained a theory of power that ties cinema and cartography to articulations of local and global control.

For this reason the longer version of the film, despite its fuzziness and unfinished look, merits comparison with the revised counterpart. At the outset of the longer version an establishing shot fades in from the black background of the title card. It is taken of the Allée des Cygnes, an island of the Seine, from what would seem to be the mezzanine of the Eiffel Tower. Light scintillates while two barges chug upstream. Cutting across the middle of the frame is the Passy Bridge. A subway rolls on its upper trestle from left to right. A classic view, the shot resembles a postcard that eternizes the edge of the city. In the synoptic version that Clair edited in the 1950s, the first shot is taken from the top of the Eiffel Tower. The camera is tilted downward to display the Seine as it stretches westward toward the Pont Mirabeau and Pont Garigliano in the distance. The Allée des Cygnes cuts a thin line through the middle of the river and is crossed at the lower edge of the frame by the barely visible line of the Pont de Passy. In both versions the crossing of the end of the Allée and Pont de Grenelle has at its crest a tiny but visible Statue of Liberty that welcomes boats sailing toward the middle of the metropolis.

In both versions, too, the film itself awakens into duration, into an unchanging time of day of the kind felt on Turgot’s map or Mercier’s Paris of 2440. Title-credits on a black background give way to a city in sunshine. Movement in the shots is minimal. The boats barely make headway while the surrounding city remains immobile. The earlier version frames the beginning between two intertitles that exploit the English rendering of “Paris qui dort” as “The Crazy Ray.” The first—“The sable Goddess, from her ebony throne, In rayless majesty, stretched forth Her leaden scepter”—equates darkness with “raylessness,” an absence of light before the second title card intervenes (after the establishing shot) to explain the quaintness of its figure of speech: “In other words, Paris was asleep.” In the re-edited copy the first intertitle follows the establishing shot. “Un soir, Paris s’endormit [One evening, Paris went to sleep].” There follows a single shot of the city that extends from the Tower to the Arc de Triomphe and beyond. Except for the sight of a car, barely visible, driving across the vacant space of the Place Trocadéro, the scene is immobile. The shot fades into black, and then an intertitle, “et, le matin suivant” (and, the following morning) fades to a medium shot of a man asleep in a modest bed.

The earlier version offers a telling variant. The Paris that sleeps is seen in a dissolve from a long shot, taken from the mezzanine of the Eiffel Tower, of the Seine and the Arc de Triomphe amidst a mass of buildings. An extreme long shot displays the Seine identified by the Pont-Neuf to the far right that cuts across the middle of the frame. The shot dissolves into another bird’s-eye view of the city, looking directly east, that extends from the site of the Tower to the cupola of the Invalides at the Place Vauban. Three shots display a city virtually dreamt in the passage of lap-dissolves. Each view is illuminated in the daylight whose source originates from the other side of the Tower. Hence the shots were taken at different times of the day; the overall effect is crucial to the illusion of endless duration that the film imposes. They are matched by another dissolve that moves from a close-up in a sparse interior of a man sleeping in a bed to a medium shot of the same interior. It is difficult to tell whether the dissolves present the background to the narrative or if they are the dream of a city “asleep” that is being lived by the man shown.

In both copies the metallic beams and rivets on the wall convey the effect of a prison cell. A shaft of light traverses the floor. The man rises from the bed, stands in the light, stretches his arms, and walks toward the window at its source. A straight cut leads to his exit from a door and entry into daylight. After an intertitle indicating that he is the night watchman of the Eiffel Tower, the camera pans right as he lights a cigarette, walks by two telescopes poised at the edge of a gridded barrier. He flicks the match over the barrier. In the early version of the film a vertiginous countertilt shows the streets below as if they were a part of an ichnographic perspective on the Champ de Mars. An immobile view is given of a parceled space into which the match falls and disappears. Above the two legs of the tower is an avenue in white that traverses the squares of the garden plot extending from the Champ de Mars.⁹

Herein an initial and crucial paradox: in the narrative the watchman is supposed to be seeing Paris immobilized in daylight, by what will later be shown to be the effects of a “crazy ray.” Yet in the distance movement is discerned, signaling that the film cannot entirely freeze the movement of the city in the view seen from the top of the Tower. In the early version the downward tilt is matched by a sudden cut to an upward pan to the top of the Tower in order, ostensibly, to mark the icarian site from which the geography of the preceding shot was taken. The camera reverses into the upward countertilt, and then to the previous ichnographic plan, before it cuts back to the watchman running along the deck to see what is happening. A still view of the Invalides (where the viewer imagines dying soldiers immobilized in their beds) and its environs confirms that nothing stirs in the city below.¹⁰

The dialectic of immobility and movement is engaged through the resemblance of the views of the city from the Tower to a city-view in the tradition of Turgot. The narrative will show that the “control” of the city has much to do with what might be called a cinematic and cartographic management.¹¹ Paris is plotted and held in the grip of a mapped image. Time is both regained and called in question in the dazzling tracking shot that follows the watchman, in search of answers to his perception that the world has stopped, who descends (in imitation of Marcel Duchamp’s “Nu descendant un escalier”) the spiral staircase of the Tower. Light cuts through an ironwork maze where the man enters, begins his descent, and disappears. A long downward track follows him making three full turns in his corkscrew path that descends around a central column in front of crisscrossed girders in front of the city in the haze of the background. In departing from his site of panoptic command he turns about and around the city. His point of view is of a continuous panorama and an unbroken “take” on the world around him. He turns, but the Tower does not, and yet the effect is dizzying.¹² He disappears into Piranesian network and then, in the same shot, suddenly appears on a metallic terrace in the foreground. The watchman, whom we discover is named Albert, has just traveled through a maze and a map of an unreal territory.

The narrative begins when the protagonist reaches the ground. The watchman becomes a pedestrian in search of lost time. The sequence that follows seems to be a cavalcade of images of sites and monuments evacuated of people, but that here and there are replaced by statues. Albert crosses the Pont Alexandre III and then effortlessly—without any interference of traffic—reaches the sculpted caryatids next to the arcs of running water of the fountain adjacent to the obelisk of the Place de la Concorde. The perspective from the Louvre to the Champs Elysées is empty; so also is that from the Concorde to the Madeleine. What would be a claustrophobic space at rush hour in 1923 turns into an agoraphobic “daymare.” Now and again a trace of life, like residue from a dream, is visible: fresh horse manure is visible on the clean cobblestones of a street or a jet of water spurts from a hose, off-screen, aimed at the greenery of a garden. The details do not quite shatter the illusion of immobility. Reporting that Albert is thinking of what the city ought to look like, an intertitle gives way to a flashback of six shots, four of which track movement from a vehicle that rolls down the Champs Elysées and toward the Concorde (two others are of horses trotting along an avenue and a bateau-mouche chugging upstream toward the Île-de-la-Cité).

The hero encounters seven frozen figures: a hack sleeping at the wheel of his taxi; a man seated on a bench by a sidewalk, whom he touches, and who breathes; a janitor arrested in moving a garbage can from a doorway to the street; a driver of a car stopped in its tracks on the slope of a street. He then meets a man poised at the edge of the Seine who appears on the verge of drowning himself. The protagonist picks up a suicide note that has fallen from the hand of the statuesque figure. In the early version the film cuts to an intertitle that reproduces the text of the note. “It’s the terrible pace of modern life that has driven me to this. I cannot stand the rush and roar of this city—,” before the film fades out and in from black (as it does with each of the scenes) to Albert’s discovery of a policeman, arrested while running around the corner of a street, about to apprehend a man who has stolen a timepiece that hangs from his left hand.

Isolated in a medium shot, the hero sits down on the curb of the sidewalk and begins to reflect. By contrast, the later version cuts directly to the episode at the airport of Paris in which a plane lands, its pilots and passengers descend, where discovery is made of personnel on the ground frozen in their tracks. The montage of the early version does not cut to the airport. (It leaves the hero sitting on the sidewalk before he runs to the taxi and puts himself at the wheel.) When he is squatting on the curb, the line of divide between the street and the walkway makes clear the spatial demarcations that were visible in each of the seven preceding encounters, especially that of the man at the edge of the river, in which a diagonal line distinguishes the hard surface of the pavement from the ripples and reflections of the water.¹³

Two spaces are made manifest. One, of everyday life, is that of the street where people would ambulate and go about their daily business; in the other, in the passages where vehicles are driven or the river flows, motion prevails. Here the film establishes other tensions as well. Death is contemplated at the edge of the water in such a way that, as Gilles Deleuze might put it, the “molar” compression of one milieu is countered by the eerie emptiness or “molecular” dispersion of the other. The editing of this version of Paris qui dort emphasizes how the edges of sidewalks, bulkheads, and river barriers become critical zones in a field of muted social conflict. In the later version a flashback or alternate episode of the arrival of the plane from Marseilles enhances the uncanny effect because it cannot be tied to the thoughts the hero entertains while he countenances the unreal city before his eyes. As Albert sits (in medium close-up) a passing car prompts him to run to the cab, to catch the specter he has just seen pass in front of him. He stops the car, meets the five occupants, and leads them to inspect the zombie-like cabbie in the vehicle he had just pilfered to catch up with the others. The group runs back to the taxi parked behind them. A close-up pictures one of the men putting his ear to the shoulder of the inert driver slumped in his seat next to the meter box. From the back a gentleman wearing a monocle and a handlebar mustache (a virtual stand-in for the spectator) looks on. What are they wishing to hear and see? Would it be the heartbeat of the deadened driver? Or possibly the tick of the meter? In either instance the gesture makes clear that they listen to silence.

The intertitle in the early version suggests that they are examining the power of control that silent cinema might exert upon the imagination. “He’s alive all right, but he’s unconscious.” The words could be those of the third voice of the medium that indirectly states how it is shaping the unconscious of the spectator at the same time, in its most diurnal aspect, it moves the narrative ahead. In its “nocturnal” aspect the intertitle brings forward the strategic virtues of the film.¹⁴ Except for the passengers in the plane and the night watchman, everyone is under a “spell” that can only be attributed to the film in which they are the principal players.¹⁵ In both copies the film cuts to life at the top of the Tower. The early version has the young woman, the object of everyone’s lust, sitting at the edge of a girder, attended by Albert, elegantly dressed in white pants and a white shirt, who admires a leg she coyly extends outward and over the background of the city below. From her ankle dangles a string of pearls that had been removed from one of the women in the restaurant. A medium close-up shows her fawning in front of a mirror she holds against the vast view of the city below. The effect of counterpoint is enhanced where the toe of her shoe seems to touch the buildings below. The string of pearls hanging from her ankle melds into the lines of streets in the distance. Both copies are cross-cut by reference to a jealous suitor seated amidst the girders above, who looks down upon the couple. Both, too, betray the paradox of immobility and movement where a bus and a car cross a boulevard below (clearly visible in the upper right-hand corner of the screen). In the sequence depicting the suitors in pursuit of the woman near the top of the Tower (the sublime moment when one of the men who jumped from the edge climbs back up the girder against the city below), a moving car is faintly visible in the distance.¹⁶

A message about where the voice originates is heard; the group descends the Tower (four by elevator, one by the spiral staircase) to find the woman who spoke into the wireless. The sound cues seen in the Tower are taken up again when the group discovers the speaker. They find a pair of shutters to which a handkerchief is attached, bang on them, and then jimmy them open. At the threshold appears a young woman who puts the index finger of her left hand to her mouth to tell them to be silent, but also, in a different register, her gesture could be telling the viewers that the film itself is silent, and that its sound can only be seen in a visual language that belongs to the medium itself.¹⁷ The volets or shutters that are pried open to gain access to sound are met with an affirmative gesture that reinforces the operative codes of the film. In both copies the woman exits. Everyone steps furtively to a corner where they hear what we read on the title cards, first a speech denoting the woman’s explanation of the origins of the rayon lourd (a heavy ray), and then of a schematic picture of two arcs emanating from a house and passing below the top of the Eiffel Tower to the left and, to the right, an airplane suspended in midair. The image becomes a representation of the turning globe about which the ray is shot westward as it rotates at the top of its horizon from France toward the Americas. The woman states that the ray has endormi le monde (put the world to sleep). The moving picture of the globe reiterates the point.

In the early version the explanation is elided in a flashback that reproduces the story of the young woman who was witness to her father’s machinations. The film fades to an abstract décor where the father, dressed in an ample bathrobe of a cloth with a zigzag pattern, explained to her—with the same drawing of the Tower and the plane—how his powerful invention worked. The flashback lasts up to the point where she makes a desperate call from a telephone (she is seen in medium close-up speaking into the receiver) before walking to the window as if to hear people tampering with it (she stands before the shutters seen from the opposite side where the men had just seconds ago forced them open). In the English intertitle she explains that the mad doctor felt that with the ray he could control the world, which the schema of the rotating globe now serves to explain.

The edited copy hastens to the encounter with the mad scientist. The group compels him, at gunpoint, to reawaken the world. He scribbles a mass of equations on blackboard set to the right of the telephone on the wall. Once the surface is filled with images, numbers, square roots, and figures of a tower and circles, he pulls a lever that precipitates a montage that brings motion to all of the frozen vignettes, seen earlier, of everyday life in Paris. During his work at the blackboard everyone in the room falls asleep. Both versions coincide in the episodes depicting the group’s return to the travails of everyday life, especially where they meet and depart from the Pont d’Iéna. The couple ascends in an elevator (shots of the Seine through the girders and light that projects amidst the iron beams return the narrative to cinematic fantasy) and finds the spot where courtship had first taken place. An extreme close-up of a ring left in a cranny is evidence that what happened, as the intertitle states, “was not a dream.” Albert slips the ring onto her finger. Seen from behind as they face the sunlight, the couple kisses as the outline of their bodies dissolves into that of the Trocadéro Palace in a bird’s-eye view from the top of the Tower. The structure and its environs city become clear before the film cuts to a black screen on which is printed “Fin.”

The ending of the longer copy is of a different texture. The couple walks together behind the gridded configuration of iron beams and studs that had been the foreground to a chase and fistfight earlier in the film. They reach the spot that had been an earlier site of love, discover the ring, and exchange vows before the endtitle caps the film. The cutting and editing insist on a mystical voyage taken both by the five visitors from Marseilles and the couple who have discovered their love. In its classical formula a traveler goes to a space “anywhere out of this world” and returns to tell interlocutors or readers a narrative—evinced by physical traces on the body or in things in the mystic’s hands—of encounters with forces beyond the reach of any form of representation.¹⁸ In its history the mystical tale attests to the validity of subjectivity and even of the anonymous individual— the person without qualities, the nameless practitioner of everyday life—of the modern era.¹⁹ In the early version of the film the mystical tale is enveloped in incredible or patently crazy effects of accelerated motion and stoppage that mesh love with a promise of bliss. In Clair’s revised cut the mystical effect is given where the silhouette of the two bodies of the lovers, drawn against bright light, blend into the shape of architecture below the Tower and on the other side of the Seine. It attenuates the unsettling and uncanny return to the gridlocked spaces in which people had earlier been incarcerated. The revised ending mottles the fixing effects of mapped forms and the agency of control that the film has theorized. It offers slight promise of synthesis where the narrative, in reaching an ending, occludes the identity of the film itself as a “crazy ray.” The mystic fable of the earlier version, in which the space-in of the film becomes the space-off of its memory in the apparent reflections of the two lovers and the spectators who leave the projection room, is all but missing in the later revision.

At the risk of seeming fastidious, comparison of the two versions of the film shows that where the editing in the shorter (later) copy yields convincing narrative effects, the theoretical—and both spatial and cartographic—import of the feature gets blurred. Some shots in the one are absent in the other, and vice-versa. In both the story begins and leads to the same outcome. Along the way some pertinent differences emerge: in the early version greater emphasis is placed on gags or tricks made from still photography or freeze-frames in the midst of the moving picture; high-speed takes are added of space crashing toward the vehicles that seem to drive recklessly along busy avenues and boulevards; the Eiffel Tower bears greater presence as a character and a spatial coordinate; copious insertion of English intertitles supplements a loose and often hazy narrative progression.

The implications, too, of the cues to sound and silence seem clearer in the early version. The mad rush on the part of the watchman and the travelers from Marseille to find the origin of the voice they hear resonating from a megaphone in the Eiffel Tower rehearses the imminent advent of sound cinema and coordination of spoken words and moving images. The characters look for a synchrony of speech and motion, but along the way they discover the degree of power that film is shown to exert on the masses liable to fall under its spell. Here the cartographic dimension of the film coincides with its self-reflexivity. On the one hand, the discovery of the ray is made in the words they hear in the voice of the mad doctor’s niece who describes the “map” of the world as it turns under the sway of the crazy ray. On the other, the viewer’s discovery is made in the expression on the face of the homuncular globe on the title cards that reacts with disquiet to what is said and shown about the range and force of the reifying ray.

The cartoon-like images in the sequence recall schemas of radio waves, from the T.S.F. (télégraphe sans fils, or “wireless”) to radiotelegraphic broadcasts that had been mobilized from the Eiffel Tower at the outset of the First World War. They are also anticipations of the emblems that studios would deploy to convince viewers of the power of their technology. The figure of the ray emanating from a house in Paris is of the same substance as the light that radiates from the beacon in the raised arm of the statuesque persona of Columbia Studios, a variant on nineteenth-century allegorical figures in the style of “Nation” and, surely, of the “Liberty” who is said to welcome immigrants and newcomers to the United States en route to the waiting rooms of Ellis Island. The radiation from an elevated point of origin anticipates the emblem RKO Studios would invent to figure lightning bolts pulsing from the spire of an Eiffel Tower. The figure of the ray that moves over the world extending from Europe to the Americas resembles, too, the logo of Universal Studios that displays the turning globe, on whose ecliptic band, like the rings of Saturn, is spelled the name of the studio. Each an emblem of destiny itself, the devices are all part of cartographic paraphernalia— personages in cartouches, terrestrial and celestial globes, utopian city-views— marshaled to display, albeit in the sugar-coating of vanguard and modernist cinema, the virtual power of the medium at the threshold of recording sound.²⁰

Both versions of the film began with a map-like shot of the Allée des Cygnes below and beyond the Eiffel Tower. If, as Baudelaire had shown in “Le Cygne”— the initial poem in the section of Les Fleurs du Mal (1857; Baudelaire 1976) titled “Tableaux de Paris,” in which a swan (a cygne), deprived a pond on which it could glide, is a sign (signe) of the unhealthy times in which it lives—the name of the island can be read in the allegorical light of poetry devoted to the monuments of Paris.²¹ Where a literal take of the Allée would include swans paddling effortlessly by its shores, in their place the viewer sees the sluggish motion of barges and river traffic inching upstream and down. And so, too, the Pont Mirabeau farther in the distance gives the lie to what the film is showing. “Vienne la nuit sonne l’heure/les jours s’en vont je demeure [Come the night sound the hour/The days flow away I remain]”: the site is where Clair’s model poet, Guillaume Apollinaire, in his celebrated poem of Alcools (1913) named after the bridge, had staged the hauntingly recurrent thoughts of suicide that a person entertains while he or she stands over the waters of the Seine (1965, 45). In Paris qui dort the voice of the suffering soul in “Le Pont Mirabeau” has as an analogue the figure of the man, frozen in his steps, who clasps a death note prior to jumping into the Seine.

The toponyms encrusted in the inaugural shot have allegorical force that resonates through the film that follows. Pertinent is the motion of the boats and the arrow-like direction that the Seine takes in arching upward and toward the left corner of the frame. At the end of the Allée des Cygnes stands a point that might qualify as a perspectival object in the cartography of the film.²² It is, as shown above, the miniature version of the Statue of Liberty, an object whose form and meaning, like the very medium of cinema at its origins, were said to have been shared by France and America. It offers in minuscule what the Tower would be in majuscule. Two cultures and two traditions are found in a distant coordinate that stands between a long and narrow island and the waters that bifurcate at the prow where the statue stands erect. In the greater view of the city the Statue of Liberty is a sign that stands for everything but liberty. In the context of the control that the film establishes liberty—indeed, motion and spatial displacement— might be what the medium of cinema, felt in the fears wrought by the fantasy of the crazy ray, will obliterate.

Within a decade of the completion of Paris qui dort Clair completed A nous la liberté (1931), a feature that impugns the inherited and shopworn meanings of “freedom” through a caustic treatment of the effects of Taylorism on French factory-workers who fabricate record players. These are the machines, if not the “spiritual automata” like the film itself and early sound cinema in general, that simulate live music and living voice.²³ The mute presence of the title of the later film in the initial shot underscores how much cinematic mapping of subjects accompanies broader reflections on cinema and its control of the mental and physical lives of those who live under its effects.

Turgot’s map of Paris appears to antedate these effects, and so also do Mercier’s reflections in his L’An 2440. Both documents, like Clair’s film, are bathed in an eternal light of day. In Paris qui dort night is limited to the black background of the intertitles. Slumber befalls the characters at any time, in the morning or daylit hours, either on the top of the Tower or in the laboratory of the mad Doctor Crase (or, as his niece names him in the later version, Dr. “lxe,” the agglutination of “luce,” “luxe,” and “lex”). The nocturnal realm of the film belongs to the unconscious that an intertitle in the first version attributes to the effects of the crazy ray. The city in the film is made to sleep or to vegetate in their unconscious, in a domain where light cannot penetrate and purify the bodies of every inhabitant of Paris. The modernity of the film would be associated with the enlightening effects of its science, but at the same time its necessarily archaic or atavistic underside would belong to the sleep that it can represent only in the form of a dream or a mystic fable.

The cartography of Paris qui dort becomes a relation of motion to mapped views of the city. The background is less immobile than what the narration suggests. Life teems around the edges. The film at once prolongs and calls into question the “enlightenment” Paris had been said to bring to the world through the inventions of modernity. Historians have shown that the wish for the birth of an eternal day that had been felt in the months following the Revolution of 1789 has always carried an underside of night, obscurity, and things forever unknown.²⁴ Utopia of the new age depends on the dream of an eternal day in which reason cannot be shaken by fantasies spawned in tremors of sleep. It appears that the characters in the film do not know what to do in the light in which they are bathed. If they dream, their reveries are blinded by the blank aspect of a city immobilized, reified, and idealized as might a map of the kind that Turgot had drawn to enlighten citizens of the abstract beauty of the City of Light. The utopian project has its dystopian underside, and modernity, like the revolution, carries the nightmare of a world where dream, alienation, and the presence of things unknown would be absent. Part of the dystopia, too, is the projection of power and control that the medium, like the cartography that underpins the film, is shown able to exercise over the inhabitants not only of Paris but also of the world at large. An alternative cinematic cartography, one that impugns universal projects of enlightenment, progress, and science, runs through the cinema of Jean Renoir. It is time to turn to his cinema of the 1930s.