The obvious template for this city symphony, "Harmonies de Paris," is Walter Ruttmann's "Berlin: Symphony of a Great City" (1927), but this French counterpart is far less well organized, as well as shorter, and lacking in any of the social observations or technical experimentation that tends to lift the genre above run-of-the-mill travelogues. In its English distribution, reportedly, it was paired with René Clair's more avant-garde "La Tour" (1928), which is also not a flattering comparison for this title. The shots of the Eiffel Tower and other tourist sites here are relatively pedestrian. Well, more accurately, many of the shots of the Parisian streets tend to be phantom-ride views from, presumably, aboard an automobile, as well as a few from a boat. Unfortunately, despite shots of airplane propellers to begin the picture, we get no aerial cinematography.
The original framework here, I'm told, was supposed to be to follow tourists around the city through 13 thematic chapters--hence the airplanes, which would mark their arrival. As it is, it doesn't quite work that way, and seems rather randomly composed--a shot of the Triumphal Arch here and construction workers there. There's little apparent rhyme or reason to it. One shot of image distortion, a bit of playing with dissolves and other editing techniques and a motif of sunlight reflecting in water are about the only traces here of experimentation and an artistic vision, and most of that is in imitation of Ruttmann's film. That makes some sense and is a product of its place, though, as Paris comparatively wasn't, and isn't, known for modernity--not in the way of Clair's focus on the Eiffel Tower, of Ruttman's Berlin, Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand's Manhattan, or Dziga Vertov's reflexive look at Moscow and Ukrainian cities.
The filmmaker Lucie Derain doesn't appear to have made many films, and this one seems to be the only one available. Her main trade is said to have been as a film critic. Nonetheless, it's interesting to see another city symphony and the work of a female filmmaker. I viewed it as part of the the Stummfilmtage Bonn silent film festival, which has been kindly streaming their performances as well during the pandemic, but it's also available to stream from the website for La Cinémathèque française, but without music.
