Speed of a Car: C'était un Rendezvous
An educational, fair use website
C'était un Rendezvous is the creation of the French filmmaker Claude Lelouch in 1976. Using a Mercedes 450SEL early one August morning, Lelouch attached a camera to the bumper of the car and sped through the streets of Paris. (The sounds of a Ferrari 275 GTB were added in post-production.) He gave the driver a set route from Porte Dauphine, through the Louvre, to the Basilica of Sacre Coeur, which is straight through the heart of Paris. The driver is still unknown to this day, because Lelouch was never able to obtain a permit to close the streets. The driver, who Lelouch told officials was an F1 racer, went over the speed limit and blew off many red lights. When this film was first shown, Lelouch was arrested, and because of this, the footage has spent many years underground before it began to resurface on DVD a few years ago. Lelouch used a new technology of the time, a gyro stabilized camera mount, in order to mount the camera on the car. The problem with this is that the technology of the time only allowed for a ten minute film with this mount. Lelouch told his driver to rush because of this time limit, and the video itself is only about nine minutes. In our velocity graph, we used all footage of the car when it was in motion.
To make a distance-time graph for Claude Lelouch's trip, we tried to mark off Paris landmarks such as large boulevards and restaurants. Between each landmark, we would record the times then, using MapQuest and Expedia, recorded the distances between each landmark. Lelouch traveled down some roads in the wrong direction, making our job tougher. When he was nearing his destination, the Sacred Heart Basilica, he made a number of twists and turns down streets we could barely find on maps. Luckily we found a large restaurant, Le Consulat, on a one-way street.
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Africa Belgrave, Stephanie Ma, Brittany Mejia, and Bridget Ritter -- 2005
External links to this page:
- C'était un rendez-vous, The Crime in your Coffee: Kult!urelles vom Ereignishorizont der tödlichen Kaffeetasse, 10 November 2005
- C'etait un Rendezvous: These students rock, Tim Child
- Claude Lelouch: C'etait un Rendezvous, San Francisco Society Art Music Culture Events - Jungle Life [alternate link]
- More Flying Ferrari Follies, Spartacus, 16 March 2006
- Route during the "Rendez-vous" movie: dda's Pics and Story, Virtual Globetrotting
- The Physics Factbook, Rage on Omnipotent, Blog Archive, 17 November 2005
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