Some may feel that [Daguerreotypes] is too claustrophobic in its form, in its photography, and in its approach to the content, that more controversial issues should have been raised for discussion, that this section of the so-called silent majority might have been given a greater opportunity to condemn itself in the eyes of a sophisticated and radical audience, and that more of modern Paris might have been provided as a context. It would have been interesting, particularly for an English viewer, for whom much that was shown is already virtually of a bygone era, to have known how much such ways of life are in jeopardy and what kinds of danger are foreseen by the Daguerreotypes themselves. After all, the development around the tour Montparnasse is creeping none too slowly up the Avenue de Maine in their direction. But it is possibly because the film guarded its intimacy...