Speeding through Paris

Running red lights, scattering pigeons & pedestrians, mounting pavements and travelling the wrong way on one way streets... it was certainly a busy morning for Claude Lelouch back in 1976.

His journey through the early morning streets of Paris is one of the most spectacular automotive scenes ever captured on film. A short film called C'était un rendez-vous ("It was a date").

The remarkable footage is not quite as spectacular as it looks or indeed sounds. For starters the engine noise, gear shifting and squealing tyres are later additions and not actual the sounds of the car racing through the near deserted Parisian streets.

The speeds the car reaches have always been a matter of dispute, with Claude Lelouch's claims seemingly disproved by closer examination of the recording. It is the angle at which the footage has been shot which creates the illusion of far greater speeds than those actually achieved. The camera was mounted as shown, placing it level with the front bumper and resulting in close up shots of the tarmac, cobbles and concrete rushing past at apparently breakneck speeds.

The nearly nine minutes of film show a journey across Paris taking in some of it's greatest landmarks, although if you blink you may have missed some of them. Anyone trying a similar stunt these days would invariably suffer severe punishment but perhaps more tellingly it's unlikely that the event could ever be replicated.

Without the closure of roads the journey would now take much longer and be far more dangerous due to the greater number of people and cars occupying the Parisian streets. It is an experiment which I hope not to see performed as the consequences of any bad luck or errors could be grave.

So one man's early morning ride has become an iconic cinematic moment, unsurpassed in the intervening 33 years. It's no surprise then that others have sought to make use of the footage over the years. All attempts at gaining permission were denied, until finally in 2007 the band Snow Patrol were allowed to use a portion of the film as the video for their song "Open Your Eyes".