Scenes on Every Floor

The story

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