Driving - possibly the coolest internet video I have ever seen…
I have a confession to make (again): I love French film. And yes, the stuffy kind.
Claude Lelouch is known best (at least to me) for his work on the film, Un Homme et Une Femme (A Man and a Woman) (**weird thing about IMDB - it says he’s “uncredited” but I’m pretty sure this isn’t the case).
From Jerry Kindall:
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.
I have found it here. Quite a ridiculously awesome experiment and a prime example of why I love old French movies: fearlessness (see my earlier post on Breathless). The race through Paris is absolutely ridiculous, absolutely insane: he nearly gets hit by a bus, kills a pedestrian, hits multiple other automobiles. But he drives. And it’s all for the film, all for this ridiculous little nine-minute piece of je ne sais “the f@%k” quoi.
Thanks Kottke.org