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Thursday, April 27, 2006

Speed

Posted by on April 27 at 14:27 PM

My friend Nic Veroli, a French philosopher, just sent me a link to an amazing short film by Claude Lelouch. Before watching the movie read this:

On an August morning in 1978, French filmmaker Claude Lelouch mounted a gyro-stabilized camera to the bumper of a Ferrari 275 GTB and had a friend, a professional Formula 1 racer, drive at breakneck speed through the heart of Paris. The film was limited for technical reasons to 10 minutes; the course was from Porte Dauphine, through the Louvre, to the Basilica of Sacre Coeur.

No streets were closed, for Lelouch was unable to obtain a permit.

The driver completed the course in about 9 minutes, reaching nearly 140 MPH in some stretches. The footage reveals him running real red lights, nearly hitting real pedestrians, and driving the wrong way up real one-way streets….Upon showing the film in public for the first time, Lelouch was arrested. He has never revealed the identity of the driver, and the film went underground until a DVD release a few years ago.


Paris is a cinema city.


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My heart was racing on that one. hahaha...racing.

i lost count of the number of red lights ran .. was this staged or just done as a gamble?

Holeeeeeeeeeeeeeee shit!

Yea. I love the fucking future. Burn Hollywood.

Hey Scholar Nigger,


What a joyous celebration of white male privilege! While America bombs brown people, you invite us to join the privledged white males in the aesthetic feast that is Paris.


And not only a European white male philosopher, but a European white male film director.


You might want to check out the footage of Simpson's 1994 white Ford Bronco speeding down the L.A. freeways. If only a fancy french film maker had attached a motion picture camera to the bumper of that Bronco!


But when black males drive at high speeds through our cities, it's not called Art, it's called a crime.


So like you I much prefer to rub shoulders with the privledged who can do just about anything their heart desires.


Especially as America slides towards world war and fascism, the exquisite pleasures of high french culture are a welcome distraction. Make sure your French friends introduce you to the best French wines. They are a world treasure. Many French were able to soften their discomfort during WWII since the best winemakers kept right on bottling.


As long as I have French Films, great food, great wines, a clean city to live in, nothing else really matters.

French Film Flam
Uh-Doy. It was a crime: the french guy got busted. OJ got off and that was art!

The. Greatest. Link. Ever.

I'll take my French Wine, delicious cheeses, and great cooking any day.


If wearing a hair shirt makes you feel superior, it's a free country.


But why shouldn't the rest of us enjoy the good life, no matter what our stupid government is doing?

Zoom! This is a trip. It's all about being alive. What else matters?

Complaints and praises aside, thanks for passing this along to us.

Some of us have studied French theory and "aesthetic" formally. It espouses individual freedom, collective concern, and... one fucking bad-ass suspicion towards government and the media.

Gee, which other country's citizens and school of thought could use some of that these days? So how about easing up on the Francophobia just a bit, huh?

(Keep it coming, Charles.)

Simply awesome. Grand Theft Auto, eat your heart out.

Cinema Verite, indeed! Now we just need some brave soul on a CBR-1100 and a Minicam to ride from Golden Gardens, across the counterbalence, past the Space Needle and powerslide into Pioneer Square in 9 minutes...

There are permanent imprints where my hands were clutching the sides of my chair! I have yet to hear a word that can describe how cool that was!

What a pile of crap. That car is going so slow. It has a race car sound on top of it to make you feel it is going fast but the speed that the surrounding trees and cars go by proves that it really is just a low slung camera giving the impression of speed. It was obviously done very early in the morning so that traffic was minimal and at a normal driving speed. If this was really fast everything on the sides of this video would be totally streaked and blurred. Watch it again and watch how slow he passes objects. It is an illusion and a poor one at that.
It is LAME, LAME, LAME
Oh did I mention it was LAME

Whoever posted that on Google video stole the write-up from my blog:

http://www.jerrykindall.com/2005/11/07_cetait_un_rendezvous.asp

There's a good amount of discussion on my site about the film, some of it informed, some of it not. I find the legends that have sprung up around the film more interesting than the film itself in some ways.

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