Le Mystère de la Tour Eiffel (The Mystery of the Eiffel Tower). 1928. Directed by Julien Duvivier

Film

Le Mystère de la Tour Eiffel (The Mystery of the Eiffel Tower). 1927. France. Directed by Julien Duvivier. Courtesy Lobster Films

Le Mystère de la Tour Eiffel (The Mystery of the Eiffel Tower). 1928. France. Directed by Julien Duvivier. Screenplay by Alfred Machard. With Tramel, Régine Bouet, Gaston Jacquet, Jimmy Gaillard. 2K digital restoration by Lobster Films. Silent; Piano accompaniment by Donald Sosin. 133 min.

A brilliantly distilled mashup of Louis Feuillade crime caper, slapstick comedy, and surreally absurdist city symphony, Julian Duvivier’s suspense thriller moves at breathtaking speed, and through all manner of trick photography, across the hurried streets of late 1920s Paris—its subterranean dens of iniquity and nefarious conspiring, its bread-and-roses circuses, the vertiginous heights of the Eiffel Tower—transforming the metropolis into a city of nets (as tortuous as the labyrinthine casbah in his 1937 Pépé le Moko) and networks (the omnipotent reach of radio transmission that would resurface in his 1932 Allo Berlin? Ici Paris!).

This film accompanies To Save and Project: The 18th MoMA International Festival of Film Preservation.

Fri, Jan 28, 2022, 4:00 p.m.

MoMA, Floor T2/T1, Theater 2

The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 2
Tue, Jan 25, 2022, 7:00 p.m.

MoMA, Floor T2/T1, Theater 2

The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 2

Licensing

If you would like to reproduce an image of a work of art in MoMA’s collection, or an image of a MoMA publication or archival material (including installation views, checklists, and press releases), please contact Art Resource (publication in North America) or Scala Archives (publication in all other geographic locations).

MoMA licenses archival audio and select out of copyright film clips from our film collection. At this time, MoMA produced video cannot be licensed by MoMA/Scala. All requests to license archival audio or out of copyright film clips should be addressed to Scala Archives at [email protected]. Motion picture film stills cannot be licensed by MoMA/Scala. For access to motion picture film stills for research purposes, please contact the Film Study Center at [email protected]. For more information about film loans and our Circulating Film and Video Library, please visit https://www.moma.org/research/circulating-film.

If you would like to reproduce text from a MoMA publication, please email [email protected]. If you would like to publish text from MoMA’s archival materials, please fill out this permission form and send to [email protected].