Rendez-vous

By Adam Stanhope in Film, Travel, Video Clips on Feb 23, 2007 at 8:57 pm

I miss Paris.

In 1976, 29 year old French filmmaker Claude Lelouch strapped a gyroscope-stabilized camera on the front of a high performance car and filmed a white-knuckle mad dash from Paris’ western Périphérique through the dark morning streets of the city, arriving at Sacre Coeur atop Montmartre eight minutes later. The film was later released as C’était un rendez-vous and quickly became a hard-to-find underground classic.

Click Play or go to Link [YouTube] or Link [Google Video].


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  1. Vean
    Feb 24th, 2007 at 2:28 am

    Woah.. that is crazy :) not as fast as the Getaway in Stockholm movies though.. THAT’s madness..

  2. François
    Feb 24th, 2007 at 3:29 am

    I think Lelouch made it with a bike and then made a post-prod session with a Maserati or a Ferrari, synchronising the accelerator to make the devil like motor sound.

    During the unique shoot, he had to get across several red lights but one of them was on a completely blind spot (I think it was at the Louvre entrance, comming out of the Seine border). So Eli Chouraki, one of his fellows, was waiting for him there with a radio, telling him to stop or to go. Unfortunately the radio went off and Lelouch went by the red light without any indication. Lucky guy.

    Loads of stories exists about this short movie…

  4. fouro
    Feb 24th, 2007 at 5:11 am

    Well, I miss behaving. Actually, that was a nice blurry tour of the town. Check out this link mined from youtube comments – a mash up of the vid with following googlemap in realtime. Sort of an irish GPS, James Bond-y thing.

  6. anon
    Feb 24th, 2007 at 7:18 am

    I believe the new snow patrol video is based on this film.

  7. pangolin
    Feb 24th, 2007 at 8:02 am

    It can’t have been too hard to find — my high school French teacher showed it to us every year. A class favorite with quite questionable educational value!

  8. astanhope
    Feb 24th, 2007 at 11:12 am

    I remember seeing it in French class once in the 1980s, too. I hadn’t seen it since until I found it poking around in Google Videos a week or two ago.

    If you read the Wikipedia article for the film itself that I linked in the post, it talks about there being photos of him attaching the camera mechanism to the front of his high performance Mercedes.

    You can see definitively that it isn’t sped up because he passes and/or interacts with a number of other moving objects, all of which are moving at normal speeds. Pigeons flying, a bus or two crossing his path and people crossing the street on foot move in real time. You’ll also notice when he speeds down the Champs-Elysees that every car he passes appears to apply their breaks as he approaches them from behind.

  9. jonnyspice
    Feb 24th, 2007 at 3:03 pm

    When does it come out on ps3?

  10. midnightclub
    Feb 24th, 2007 at 3:37 pm

    This completely reminds me of Midnight Club racing for the Playstation2. All he needed was a few ramps, and some bad music for a soundtrack!

  11. eggplant
    Feb 25th, 2007 at 1:53 am

    Nice to see this again after *gulp* 30 years.

  12. intelnm
    Apr 19th, 2007 at 8:32 am

    it also reminds me of the Need for Speed Games

  13. intelnm
    Apr 19th, 2007 at 8:32 am

    i would him to try that at rush hour


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