Ménilmontant

Watched Dimitri Kirsanoff's Ménilmontant last night. It's right out of the top drawer. Filmed in 1926 when the rubric for making a film was not yet set, the rules not there to be broken. You can sense the sheer vitality that the filmmaker is enabled with because of this. It feels like a Zola novel, a great portrait of urban life, and also a valuable document of the way Paris looked at the time. Kirsanoff is not weighed down by cinematic antecedents, there are no Hitchockian homages, no cinematic in-jokes, no nods to popular culture, no product placement. This makes the film alive with atmosphere, almost overflowing with it. Somehow Mr Kirsanoff places you in the film, makes you an insider to the innocence of childhood, the loneliness of the big city, the despair of poverty, the shock of betrayal.

His camera is like the Kino-Eye, and it looks at things the way real people look at them, making it the least phallic use of a camera that I have seen. The shots of the Seine, of the countryside, of Ménilmontant, and the roving, lingering, pace of the camera were quite literally breath-taking. There are no intertitles in this silent movie, and the plot is a little opaque, but really this is not taking the movie on its own terms, it is a masterpiece of camera-work and editing and provides the most atmosphere of any movie I have ever seen. It is ESSENTIAL to watch this movie at its 38 minute pace. I saw it on the double-disc Kino edition of Avant-garde: Experimental Cinema of the 1920s and 30s. This is the best value for money DVD on the market full stop.

Recently I watched Lang's The Testament of Dr Mabuse and became aware through his virtuosic use of sound, how taken for granted sound is in movies these days. Watching Ménilmontant makes you realise how taken for granted image is, most of modern cinema is simply about dubious storytelling to quote something I heard on TV, "…it's a cultural wasteland filled with inappropriate metaphors and an unrealistic portrayal of life created by the liberal media elite". I recommend this movie to all lovers of cinema, it really is a movie that can make you once again enthuse about the moving image.

Dmitri Kirsinov's Menilmontant is considered to be a landmark in the art of film-making. The story is sparse, melodramatic, and brief. The film is barely twenty minutes long. A young girl leaves home after a somewhat vague hatchet murder takes place. She spends time in the seedy streets of Menilmontant, a medieval suburb of Paris. She drifts through a relationship with her sister and man friend.

If you are looking for a strong story and character development, you may be missing the point. Kirsanov was trying to manipulate images in such a way as to get a reaction from his viewer. The bigger story is just a convention on which to hang his moody images. The axe murder with its choppy editing is a very early use of this sort of emotive technique. You are one moment under the flailing axe, interleaved with fast cuts of a howling victim. Later in the film the younger sister is the center of a blurry sensual reverie, her body and her grim surroundings in and out of focus. Silent film as art needs to be taken on its own terms. Kirsanov and other early filmmakers helped to define the way we view, and how we understand the film narrative. That understanding of how the film story works was established quite some time ago, which needs remembering by those of us not around in 1926. It was not foreordained that fast editing, double exposure and other techniques would come into their own. Someone had to prove the power of a restrained use of these formal ideas. Kirsanov did this in 1926.

After the violent and brutal death of their parents, two sisters leave to the big city to live. There, one of the sisters falls in love with a young man, but he is unfaithful and she is left having to deal with her own lost dreams and a baby without a job or a friend.

This is an interesting experimental film. It shows a lot more violence and sex than typically shown at the time, and yet it is very contemplative and serene in parts. However, as a subject of lost dreams, mostly it's very tragic. The image of interest here is the recurring motif of water. Water seems to provide all of the "insanity," including the boy seemingly coming from a spilt water barrel and a long montage of the woman contemplating something drastic as she looks out over the river.

It's powerfully affecting. It's strongest when hectic, during death or violence (beginning and end) or the sudden change from the serene quiet of the country to the speed and confusion of the city. It is a tragedy in every way, as lives are shattered in one way or another until a rather biting climax.

--PolarisDiB

There is an old German proverb that says that size doesn't matter ( well, size does count for this count having in mind the perimeter of his Teutonic heiresses… ) and the saying rings true with "Ménilmontant" a medium-length silent film directed by Herr Dimitri Kirsanoff, and a striking, disturbing masterpiece.

Herr Kirsanoff's direction is astonishing in every aspect of the film, particularly in its technique. It's a mixture of drama, avant-garde, experimental film and hyper realism. The story depicted in the film ( the terrible life of two orphan sisters ) doesn't allow any concession to the audience; to watch "Ménilmontant" today still invokes amazement, distress and an infinite sadness.

From the very start of the film ( superb, striking and masterful editing by Herr Kirsanoff himself ) the director shows power and imagination and a strong control of film narrative ( there is no need of intertitles ). Kiransoff's use of imagery is thrilling and brilliant. Images emphasize a ruined happy childhood and the duality and dangers of a big city ( flashbacks, imaginative camera angles, dreamy and poetic shots ) not to mention the sorrowful life of the two orphans, an existence of loneliness, abandonment and despair that broke the heart of a heartless German aristocrat, especially the superb scene in which the younger sister ( touching Dame Nadia Sibirskaia ) ,alone and hungry on a bench park with her baby, accepts some bread from an old man, a moving and lyrical scene, that summarizes the spirit and achievement of this oeuvre.

"Ménilmontant" is a work of art, a striking experimental style in the service of a tragic and sad story, brilliantly and disturbingly balanced.

And now, if you'll allow me, I must temporarily take my leave because this German Count must become a little livelier.

Herr Graf Ferdinand Von Galitzien http://ferdinandvongalitzien.blogspot.com/

This is one that no one can afford to miss in a lifetime of viewing, that is no one who's interested in the deepest workings of how things move. In my third viewing now, it may just be the pinnacle of the first 30 years. But before saying more, let's quickly clear the air from fixed perceptions so it can rise up in front of us vibrantly as what it is, all the more greater.

First to reclaim it from the museum of merely academic appreciation that covers, silents in particular, with the shroud of musky relic. Coming to us from so far back it may appear as the studied work of a venerable master - and yet it's the work of a 25 year old (filming started in '24) who shot it by himself with his girl around Paris, hand-held, and edited in camera.

The workings of fate or grande history that demand crowds and decor are pushed to the side, this is a youthful cinema ("indie" we would call it now) that beats with the heart of young people trying to fathom life in the complex city and I urge you see it as such. Kirsanov was an émigré new to Paris after all. Watch it as puzzling modern life that keeps you awake at nights, not as some scholar's symbolism.

Then to reclaim it from the clutches of "experimental" and "avant- garde", labels as though it were just about the tweaking of form, an exercise of trying to be ahead of time. There are many of those from the era, marvelous experiments in seeing, and Kirsanov was not just a wide-eyed country boy - he had articles published on "photogenie" before he made this and would know the radical tropes. But this enters beyond.

The best way I find myself able to describe it is this.

There's a story here that you can unfold in a way that it makes simple sense, melodrama about an orphaned girl lost in the big city. Melodrama since well before of course, offered us a certain facsimile of life where this clearly begat that, the disparity caused grief, the resolutions restored clarity. There's a heart breaking scene here on a bench worthy of Chaplin. She wanders with a baby cradled in her arms, trials and tribulations that innocence must go through.

Now this facsimile rippled and violently tossed about like curtains at an open window are shuffled by gusts of air, ellipsis, abstraction, rapid-fire montage, and all the other tools that Kirsanov would have known from being in Paris at the time of Epstein and others. So far so good. The film would have been great with just this mode, wholly visual, "experimental". The girl Nadia is lovely, the air dreamlike.

But there's something else he does, that is still in the process of being fathomed decades later by penetrative thinkers like Lynch. There are hidden machinations in the world of the film, illogical machinery at play, that turn at a level deeper than we can clearly fathom at any point. You should know here that Kirsanov had to cross a Europe collapsing by war and revolutions to reach Paris, he would have found out months after he left home that his father had been murdered on the street by communist thugs.

Suddenly there is the nagging sense of a presence that moves behind appearances, giving rise to mysteriously connected perturbations. A marvelous sequence shows one sister being seduced in a room (uncertain, but giving in), the other sister alone in their bed reading from a book as if daydreaming the whole dalliance.

And then the second sister knowingly letting herself be seduced, the first observing the scene from below as if she has splintered off into separate selves, one being seduced above, the other realizing in hallucinative daydream the mistake of giving herself to this boy.

This is marvelous. Impulses from an open window, and through the flimsy fabric of the curtains, the vague coming and going of people in a room, half-finished glimpses, but we begin to sense pattern here. Two girls, two murders, two seductions, but one calculated and wrong.

The most startling moment is the opening; a puzzling violence has stolen into this world, creating the story, rendered with haunting imagery of a struggle before a window. Now every account of the film I've read believes these are the parents of the girls and some madman, but this is not said anywhere. In the graveyard after, we see the father's grave with wreaths, a funeral that day, but none on the mother's, it looks abandoned. Maybe someone was caught where he shouldn't have been, calculated and wrong.

And this veiled and bubbling causality goes through everything to appear again in the finale; the first murder wasn't random, what says the second is? Maybe a holdup just so happened to visit him, maybe someone was paid off. The door is open, you go in where your body takes you.

Something to meditate upon