Nowadays, dashcam videos are all about cataloging helicopter flybys, sheep attacks, and road-rage fails, and of course providing highly-detailed analyses of freak astronomical events. In 1976, dashcam videos were all about driving real fucking fast.That's the spirit behind Claude Lelouch's Rendezvous, at least. Shot in asingle take through the streets of Paris at dawn, the eight-and-a-half minute whiteknuckle burner is arguably the first entrant in the dashcam genre.It's not only a testament to deft wheelhandling, brazen disregard for the well being of unwitting bystanders, and sheer luck. The driver, who may or may not have been a random taxi driver, a F1 racer, or Lelouch himself, blows numerous red lights, dodges garbage trucks, and drives the wrong way on one-way streets. At one point, whoever is behind the wheel rips through the one blind juncture in Lelouch's pre-plotted route doubly blind—Elie Chouraqui, the only assistant on Rendezous' guerilla "set" who stood near the Louvre, walkie-talkie in hand (she could talk directly with the driver), saw her two-way comms crap out last minute.Rendezvous was an exercise in state-of-the-art vérité filmmaking.Lelouch used a gyro-stabilized camera mount, the highest of high-tech for the time, to affix the camera (if you're wondering, it was probably, maybe an EClair cam-flex 35mm with a wide-angle lens) to the front bumper of what's now believed to have been a Mercedes 450SEL. The irony was that riding along the cutting edge found Lelouch under considerable time constraints, as the 1,000-foot 35mm film reel Lelouch shot the thing on has notoriously short capacity.And so he told his man, or whomever it was tasked with wending through the dawn-y thoroughfares of Paris, to step on it. In the end, they made it out alive with just under nine minutes of gloriously fast, light-traily footage. Lelouch was promptly arrested, but only after the film's closing shot: a lover's embrace at an overlook rendezvous. The virality and physics of driving around have never been the same.@thebanderson
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