René Clair – { feuilleton }

Paris Qui Dort by René Clair

A half-hour comic science fiction film made the same year as Clair’s much more experimental Entr’acte (1924):

The young keeper of the Eiffel Tower awakes one morning and, from his vantage point at the top of the tower, finds that the whole of Paris is at a standstill. On descending the tower, he finds the streets are filled with stationary cars and motionless people. He meets up with a group of tourists who have just landed in a biplane at Paris airport. Unable to explain what has happened, they waste no time profiting from their situation – acquiring new clothes, jewels and wads of bank notes. But they soon grow tired of their new-found freedom and return, bored, to the Eiffel Tower. There, they receive a radio message from a girl, asking to be rescued. She claims to know what has happened to Paris…

Scenes of empty cities are always fun although the effect here is rather hit-and-miss when you glimpse distant cars moving down the streets. The film has French intertitles but the copy at Ubuweb includes a translation. The idea of using temporary stasis to commit robberies reminds me of Arthur C Clarke’s short story All the Time in the World in which someone uses a time accelerator to plunder the British Museum. The story was filmed for American TV in 1952, and may be watched here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Entr’acte by René Clair

Anémic Cinéma

It’s no doubt up to the viewer to decide what constitutes anaemia in Marcel Duchamp’s 7-minute film. Anémic Cinéma was made the same year as Emak-Bakia with the assistance of Man Ray and Marc Allégret. Duchamp’s Rotoreliefs spin hypnotically alternating with punning epithets in French. The spinning artworks later appeared as Duchamp’s contribution to Hans Richter’s Dreams That Money Can Buy (1947).

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Emak-Bakia
• Un Chien Andalou
• Ballet Mécanique
• Dreams That Money Can Buy
• La femme 100 têtes by Eric Duvivier
• Entr’acte by René Clair

Emak-Bakia

Posts this week will tend towards the brief since I’m spending all my time finishing Reverbstorm.

I thought I’d already posted something about Emak-Bakia, a 16-minute “cinépoème” by Man Ray from 1926, but it seems not. This is another of those short experimental films that proliferated between the wars, and a particularly inventive one with Man Ray throwing together every camera trick he could manage; he even throws the camera in the air at one point, having earlier driven over it. There’s also bits of animation, many shots of revolving sculptures and the artist’s customary emphasis on attractive women. Watch it at Vimeo or download it from Ubuweb.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Un Chien Andalou
• Ballet Mécanique
• Dreams That Money Can Buy
• La femme 100 têtes by Eric Duvivier
• Entr’acte by René Clair

Un Chien Andalou

What is there to say about Buñuel and Dalí’s timeless film that hasn’t already been said? It’s one of the primary Surrealist documents and something that everyone should see at least once. Cyril Connolly attended the Paris premiere in 1929:

The picture was received with shouts and boos and when a pale young man tried to make a speech, hats and sticks were flung at the screen. In one corner a woman was chanting, “Salopes, salopes, salopes!” and soon the audience began to join in. With the impression of having witnessed some infinitely ancient horror, Saturn swallowing his sons, we made our way out into the cold of February, 1929, that unique and dazzling cold…

Why does this strong impression still persist? Because Un Chien Andalou brought out the grandeur of the conflict inherent in romantic love, the truth that the heart is made to be broken, and after it has mended, to be broken again. For romantic love, the supreme intoxication of which we are capable, is more than an intensifying of life; it is a defiance of it and belongs to those evasions of reality through excessive stimulus which Spinoza called “titivations.” By the law of diminishing returns our desperate century forfeits the chance of being happy and, because it finds happiness insipid, our world is regressing to chaos.

The film comes and goes on YouTube so serious viewers are directed to the BFI DVD/Blu-ray release which comes twinned with Buñuel’s L’Age D’Or.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Dreams That Money Can Buy
• La femme 100 têtes by Eric Duvivier
• Entr’acte by René Clair

Ballet Mécanique

A film to round off a week of connected posts. Ballet Mécanique (1924) is more Dada than Surrealist if you want to get strict about the taxonomy, but the latter movement grew out of the former, and this short experiment by Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy is a pioneering piece of work however it’s labelled. The film was photographed by Man Ray who used a variety of techniques including animation and kaleidoscope shots to present a “ballet” of machine parts and kitchen utensils. Some of the kaleidoscope images are so close to the opening shots of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) you have to wonder whether a viewing of this gave Lang ideas.

Ballet Mécanique has been provided with many scores over the years, from player pianos and sirens to more traditional arrangements. The copy at the Internet Archive has a contemporary score but like all silent films this can always be replaced with music of your own choosing.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Dreams That Money Can Buy
• La femme 100 têtes by Eric Duvivier
• Metropolis!
• Entr’acte by René Clair