Fantasy: La fontaine d'Aréthuse (1936, Dimitri Kirsanoff)

La fontaine d'Aréthuse (1936)
France, 8 min

Directed by: Dimitri Kirsanoff

Polish composer Karol Szymanowski (1882-1937) wrote his three Mity (Myths) classical pieces in 1915, in a collaboration with violinist Pawel Kochañski, for whom the pieces were originally conceived. I don't know anything about classical music, but apparently this work was revolutionary, described as "impressionistic" and "a new style, a new mode of expression for the violin." The three pieces were "La Fontaine d'Aréthuse," "Narcisse" and "Dryades et Pan," of which the first is the most well-known. To my knowledge, there's no specific story that is supposed to go with La Fontaine d'Aréthuse," but here Dimitri Kirsanoff has apparently attempted to devise his own. Fitting the images to the music, but also striving to tell a story, La Fontaine d'Aréthuse (1936) follows his similarly music-orientated short film of the previous year, the wonderful Les Berceaux / The Cradles. Like the latter, it was also photographed by Boris Kaufman, who would later achieve success in Hollywood as a cinematographer.

La Fontaine d'Aréthuse (1936) opens with credits over shimmering images of water, somewhat reminiscent of Ralph Steiner's H2O (1929). After this, the music takes prominence, and we see a pianist and violinist beginning the classical piece. That Kirsanoff even bothered to show the musicians emphasises the importance he placed on the music itself, re-enforcing that this piece wasn't merely chosen at random to suit the images. "La Fontaine d'Aréthuse" opens with what has been described as a "shimmering wash of sound in the piano, octave leaps in the left hand passing above and below repeated chords in the right," a tune which apparently suggests the splashing waters of a fountain. The story "told" by the music involves a naked water goddess on the river shore (no Production Code being enforced in France!), who is pursued by a Tarzan-like hunter, before disappearing into thin air to join her water once again. Pleasant, and recommended, viewing.
7/10

Avant-Garde: Junkopia (1981, Chris Marker, John Chapman, Frank Simeone)

Junkopia (1981)
France, 6 min

Directed by: Chris Marker, John Chapman, Frank Simeone

Written by: Chris Marker

Starring: Arielle Dombasle (voice)

Junkopia (1981) is only my second film from Chris Marker – after the breathtaking, poetic La Jetée (1962) – but the two works are not all that dissimilar. Indeed, out of a purely documentary framework, Marker (with co-directors John Chapman and Frank Simeone) seems to have constructed a work of science-fiction. Like his previous masterwork, Junkopia exists without dialogue (and, in this case, characters) and also eschews movement (though not as dramatically as the other film's still images), both by the camera and its subjects. There is one marked exception to this rule. Just as La Jetée climaxed in an unforgettable shot of a woman's eyes fluttering open, Marker ends this film by swiftly and unexpectedly zooming out from a model ship floating in the ocean, startlingly reinforcing the vast, alienating landscape that is his subject. In fact, "alien" is an ideal adjective to describe the film. Michel Krasna's electronic score wails insistently on the soundtrack, as eerily disconcerting as Kubrick's use of Ligeti's "Atmospheres" in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).

Junkopia opens into a landscape that, peculiarly, struck me as otherwordly. Man-made sculptures – first an aeroplane, then a montage of figures assembled from junk – roost in the depths of the ocean, anchored in a body of water that seems infinitely vast and deep. The soundtrack blends synthesised music with atmospheric sound effects; a radio transmission appears to source from a sculpture of a lunar module, emphasising the directors' focus on what seems a genuinely alien environment. Birds flutter occasionally across the frame, but life otherwise seems muted: aside from his leftover junk, humans seemingly have no part in this unfamiliar specter of reality. But then the film pulls its most intriguing twist. Alternate angles of the sculptures reveal their close proximity to civilisation – beside bustling roadways, nestled before the looming skyline of a metropolis. We are in San Francisco. The surreal landscape was that of our own making, the detritus of human existence hugging the fringes of nature. For five minutes, we were looking at the human world through someone else's eyes.

7/10

Avant-Garde: The Return to Reason (1923)

Le Retour à la raison / The Return to Reason (1923)
France, 3 min
Directed by: Man Ray
Starring: Kiki of Montparnasse

I always get a headache trying to work out what avant-garde cinema is all about – allegedly, cinema brawls have been started for this very reason. So I've decided to appreciate The Return to Reason (1923) for its aesthetic qualities only, and there are plenty. The beginning of the film is a hectic collage of white specks and rotating silhouettes, some footage created without the use of a camera, similar to the later work of Stan Brakhage. Ticking clocks, nail outlines, bright lights, spinning egg crates – what it all means, I don't know, but the brisk editing pace maintains a strong momentum that easily carries through the two-minute running time. Ray's montage flows smoothly for the most part, but occasionally jars like a jump-cut as he switches from one photographic technique to another; for example, from moving to static images, or between visuals produced with and without a camera. In this sense, the film doesn't stream as pleasantly as similar avant-garde works like Richter's Ghosts after Breakfast (1928) and Vávra's The Light Pentrates the Dark (1931).

This was my first film from Man Ray, one of the leading figures in the Dadaist film movement of the 1920s. Dada (or Dadaism) is characterised by the rejection of logic and rationality in artistic expression, and so the embracing of chaos. The title The Return to Reason seems to be intentionally contradictory, at odds with a film in which very little reason is to be found. Perhaps the randomness is all for the director's own amusement – Man Ray was notorious for his wry sense of humour, and he reportedly "talked so you could never tell when he was kidding." He once stated that "To create is divine, to reproduce is human," suggesting an overlying theme of sex in his work. Indeed, the finale of this film involves the naked torso of a woman – perhaps this "return to reason" is the realisation, after two minutes of frenzied, random soul-searching, of what matters most to a man. I can sympathise.
6/10

Music: Les Berceaux (1935, Dimitri Kirsanoff)

Les Berceaux (1935)

France, 5 min

Directed by: Dimitri Kirsanoff

Starring: Ninon Vallin

As do most cinephiles, I first got onto avant-garde filmmaker Dimitri Kirsanoff through Ménilmontant (1926). Though I quite enjoyed this effort, the determinedly-disorientating editing style, for me, kept it from being the masterpiece many proclaim. Les Berceaux / The Cradles fortunately sees Kirsanoff severely toning down his erratic editing, and, indeed, you'd be tempted to believe that the director had forgotten his passion for Soviet montage in the intervening decade. This five-minute musical short film most strongly recalled Sergei Eisenstein and Grigori Aleksandrov's similar Romance Sentimentale (1930), in that both films feature only singing female protagonists accompanied by a visual montage. But, as I mentioned, Kirsanoff's montage is slow, meditative; he finds a relaxing serenity in the woman's (Ninon Vallin) voice, as is conscious that quick-cut editing would likely interrupt the peacefulness of her song. Instead, he favours slow cross-fades and transitional wipes, and even utilises an imaginative visual technique to avoid some transitions altogether.

From what I gathered, Les Berceaux is about the dedicated sailors who venture out into the deepest ocean, and the wives who must await their return. The woman sits in her living room, gently rocking her infant's cradle as she sings, the movement mimicking the rolling motion of the ocean waves. Many men will lose their lives to the ocean's vast waters, but the juxtaposition of death and life (in the cradle) suggests an endless and noble cycle. Kirsanoff imaginatively places a rear-projection screen outside the woman's window, through which, as she sings, we can watch the ocean waves lapping up against the shore, or the ship charging majestically over the water. Also worth noting is that the film was photographed by Boris Kaufman, who later also shot On the Waterfront (1954) and 12 Angry Men (1957). In all, Les Berceaux is a pensive and peaceful ode to a life at sea, and fans of Kirsanoff should certainly seek it out.
8/10

Comedy: The Living Playing Cards (1904, Georges Méliès)

The Living Playing Cards (1904)
France, 3 min
Directed by: Georges Méliès
Written by: n/a
Starring: Georges Méliès

WARNING: Plot and/or ending details may follow!!! [paragraph 3 only]

Considering that Georges Méliès was a stage magician before he took an interest in cinema, it's no surprise that he liked to incorporate countless little "magic acts" into his films. As a rule, his narrative-driven films {such as A Trip to the Moon (1902) and The Impossible Voyage (1904)} are by far his most impressive works, not only for their revolutionary storytelling structures, but also for their seemingly-boundless imagination and creativity. Nevertheless, further genius is to be found in Méliès' shorter "gimmick films," which translated the magician's tricks to the cinema screen and proved crucial in the development of visual effects. Too often, early filmmakers like Edison and the Lumière brothers employed this new technology for purely documentary purposes, presenting audiences with brief snippets of everyday life. However, this French "Cinemagician" took a vastly different outlook on the possibilities made feasible by the humble cinematograph: he made the impossible happen before our very eyes.

The Living Playing Cards (1904), along with the delightfully-whimsical The Four Troublesome Heads (1898), is one of Méliès' most inventive special-effects showcases. The film starts simply enough, with Méliès – our host, as always – stepping out onto the stage and showing the audience a playing card. It is too small for anybody to decipher, so, with a quick slide of the wrist, the card is suddenly substantially larger. He then manages to transfer the card image onto a large, blank sheet of paper, and then the Queen on the life-sized card is magically transformed into a living, breathing queen who emerges from the paper and walks around the stage. These transformations – some more refined than others – employ the use of quick cuts, multiple dissolves and cross-fades, techniques with which Méliès had been experimenting for many years. The two-minute film is presented in the style of a traditional magic act, presenting contemporary audiences with a format with which they were familiar, but somewhat furtively offering the magician a greater flexibility with his tricks.

The most entertaining part of the film takes place at the very end, when Méliès accidentally transforms the King on the playing card into a real-life King, who bursts threateningly from his sheet of paper. Terrified, Méliès flees the stage in fear. Just as he does this, the King throws off his costume to reveal that he is Méliès himself! The first time I saw this, I was genuinely taken aback by the unexpected reveal, and it took several closer inspections to deduce how the trick was actually performed; from what I was able to tell, the director substituted himself into the King's clothes at the very moment that the costume were cast aside. Such an act demonstrates very effectively the advantages enjoyed by Méliès once he had adopted this revolutionary new technology, and, ever since, magicians have struggled vainly to keep up with the advancements presented by the cinematic medium. If magicians are now a dying breed, they can blame their unemployment on clever little films like this one.
8/10

Avant-Garde: Ménilmontant (1926, Dimitri Kirsanoff)

Ménilmontant (1926)

France, 38 min

Directed by: Dimitri Kirsanoff

Written by: Dimitri Kirsanoff

Starring: Nadia Sibirskaïa, Yolande Beaulieu, Guy Belmont, Jean Pasquier, Maurice Ronsard

Dimitri Kirsanoff, born in Estonia but operating mostly in Paris, was heavily influenced by the theories of Soviet Montage. In his most famous short film, Ménilmontant (1926) – still frightfully obscure in most circles – he adheres to this style strictly, almost obsessively. His preference towards a brisk editing pace carries a unique vitality that is also seen in the work of Soviet masters Eisenstein and Vertov, who pioneered and perfected the technique of montage in the mid-to-late 1920s. But, nevertheless, I don't think it works quite as well here. The Battleship Potemkin (1925) and The Man with the Movie Camera (1929) – perhaps the two most recognised works of Soviet montage – utilise their chosen editing style to full effect precisely because they place greater emphasis on the collective over the individual, in accordance with traditional Communist ideology. There is deliberately no emotional connection attempted nor made between the viewer and any individual movie character, for that would be contrary to the filmmaker's intentions (interestingly, however, the montage fell out of preference from the 1930s in favour of Soviet realism).

Ménilmontant falters because it strives to create an emotional connection with the characters (particularly the younger sister, played by Nadia Sibirskaïa), but Kirsanoff's chosen editing style continually keeps the audience at an arm's length. The closest he comes to true pathos is with the park-bench sequence, when an old man offers some bread and meat to the famished woman, delicately avoiding eye contact to preserve her dignity. Even in this scene, the montage style intrudes. A director like Chaplin (and I'm a romantic at heart, so he's naturally one of favourite filmmakers) would have placed the camera at a distance, framing the profiles of both the woman and the old man within the same shot, thus capturing the subtle emotions and inflections of both parties simultaneously. Kirsanoff somewhat confuses the scene, cutting sequentially between the woman, the man and the food in a manner that reduces a simple, poignant act of kindness into a technical exercise in film editing. It works adequately, of course, a precise demonstration of the Kuleshov Effect, but there's relatively little heart in it.

But we'll cease with my complaints hereafter. I know my own film tastes well enough to recognise that what I disliked about the film – its emotional distance, for example – represents precisely what others love about it. There's no doubting that the photography (when it's kept on screen long enough) is breathtakingly spectacular, making accomplished use of lighting, shadows and in-camera optical effects such as dissolves, irises and superimpositions. There are touches of the surreal. Kirsanoff cuts non-discriminately forwards in time, backwards and into his characters' dreams, fragmenting time and reality into a series of shattered images, their individual meanings obscure until considered sequentially as in the pieces of a puzzle. Most impressive, I thought, was how several shots captured the linear perspective of roads and alleys, watching his characters gradually depart into the distance as though merely following the predetermined pathways of their future. The film ends exactly as it begins – with a bloody and unexplained murder – suggesting the inevitable cycle of human suffering, its causes unknown and forever incomprehensible.

7/10