Paris qui dort Paris qui dort (English title: Crazy Ray) reflects Ren?Clair's "desire to revive...the tradition of the French comic shorts and of M?i?s's f?ries. Although he shared the narrative avant-garde filmmakers' fascination with 'the cinematographic machine,' Clair disapproved of what he believed to be their excessive aestheticism and redirected the apparatus toward different ends. In Paris qui dort, consequently, the narrative avant-garde film practice is placed explicitly in the service of an amuing fantasy and a wittily satirical social vision....One morning, Albert, the night watchman on the Eiffel Tower, awakens to discover nothing at all moving in the city below (-time has stood still)."-Richard Abel, French Cinema: The First Wave