Scenes on Every Floor 1904

Directed by Lucien Nonguet

The 1904–1905 Pathé short Un coup d’œil par étage (literally “A Glance on Each Floor”) is an inventive early comedy that presents a whimsical peek into life across multiple apartments in a single building. It plays with cinematic point-of-view and narrative structure in a way that was novel at the time. The film cuts between brief vignettes on each apartment floor: a man at a phone, a pillow fight between children, an elderly lady with a cat—and finally, a resident scrambling to extinguish curtains that have caught fire. Structured as a vertical tour ("par étage"), the short runs about 6 minutes in restored screenings and was featured in retrospectives on early cinem