Two friends who had met in prison meet again in the business world. One of them, an escapee, has become a powerful boss. The other, having served his sentence, is a mere worker on the assembly line. They are equally ill at ease in the hell of industrial production and decide to escape together. Making clever use of songs, sound effects, a horizontally panning camera, rhythmic dialogue and choreographed movements, Rene Clair created a sublime musical comedy satire on the work ethic. The film inspired Chaplin’s Modern Times.

France, 1931.
English subtitles.
Black and white.
97 min.

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Paris qui dort (The Crazy Ray), Clair’s first film is a manic comedy about a crazed inventor who perfects a ray that suspends animation throughout Paris. The prolific jokes about motion and stasis are fundamentally movie concept gags and they relate directly to avant-garde film concerns of the 1920.

France, 1923.
Black and white.
20 min.