"I'D RATHER BE IN PARIS depicts the filmmaker's visual concern with his physical environment by autobiographically exploring his alternatives: Chicago, San Francisco, and the editing room itself. These urban explorations tend to concentrate on high- speed assemblages of cityscape abstractions.
"Sprawling masses of concrete, plastic and steel seem to have captured the earth. Nature threatens only with the icy cold waves of Lake Michigan and an apocalyptically red sunset. Humans, for the most part hauntingly innocuous, are reduced to soul-less, miniscule organisms. Simultaneously random, repetitious, and absurd, their activities resemble those of amphetiminized rats in their proverbial maze. Even a Wim Wenders on-location film-shoot appears to be nothing more than men and equipment, standing around waiting.
"Only the editing room serves as a sanctuary. It is here that some semblance of order and tranquility resides. The camera pans the studio. But it too is drawn to the outside world...the chaos, the confusion, the overwhelming massiveness. Light shifts dramatically, and through the window we glimpse a final image of this industrio-techanized age the filmmaker so readily fears and transforms." --Roger Nieboer
