French Avant-Garde

1902 · Georges Méliès

Méliès is here as the ancestor. Substitution splices, painted sets, a Moon with a face: a camera used to make things up rather than record them. The 1920s took the license and dropped the plot.

1915 · Louis Feuillade

Six hours of crime on real Paris streets, and the Surrealists watched it on a loop. Irma Vep in a black bodystocking on a roof is the image. Feuillade did not mean it as a dream. That is why it works as one.

1919 · Abel Gance

Made while the war was still on, with Saint-Mihiel footage shot beside the U.S. Army cut into the last act. The dead rising were two thousand soldiers on leave from Verdun, and most of them were dead within weeks. Gance's rapid cutting and superimpositions start here. So does the rage.

1923 · Germaine Dulac

Half an hour, a provincial house, and a woman who smiles because that is required. Dulac uses slow motion and superimposition for the life she is not allowed. The empty revolver is the plot. The camera thinking for her is the film.

1923 · Jean Epstein

Photogénie put to work: a Marseille bar, a dock, and a carousel the camera rides until the faces smear. Epstein had just published the theory. The melodrama is the excuse. The fairground is the demonstration.

1924 · René Clair

Made to run between acts of a Dada ballet, with Satie in the pit. Duchamp and Man Ray play chess on a roof, a hearse gets away from its mourners, and the funeral turns into a chase. Clair cuts to the tempo of a joke. Picabia wanted the audience provoked, and the coffin obliged.

1924 · Fernand Léger, Dudley Murphy

Cut to a beat. Kiki's mouth, a washerwoman on stairs in a loop, pistons, bottles, a Chaplin puppet. Léger wanted film to move the way his tubes painted. Fifteen minutes with no story to excuse it, and none needed.

1924 · Marcel L'Herbier

The guest list is the point: Mallet-Stevens built the villa, Léger the laboratory, Cavalcanti and Autant-Lara the rooms. The plot is society nonsense with a resurrection machine at the end. Walk through the sets. That is what L'Herbier built them for.

1925 · René Clair

Clair's first: a scientist's ray freezes Paris and a few people high enough to miss it loot the shops. The tower is real. A policeman mid-step, a drink half poured, a suicide paused on the ledge. A comedy about what people do when no one is watching.

1926 · Jean Renoir

Renoir before Renoir, spending money to look like money and losing it. Hessling plays Nana as a stylized gesture, not a person, and the apartments grow while the men shrink. Watch for the compositions in depth. The director of the 1930s is in there, waiting.

1926 · Dimitri Kirsanoff

Two sisters, a country killing, a Paris district, and almost no titles. Kirsanoff shot it outside the companies with a handheld camera and Nadia Sibirskaïa's face. The bench scene, a stranger sharing bread, is the moment. Thirty-eight minutes, and the avant-garde's best case that form can carry feeling.

1926 · Alberto Cavalcanti

A day in Paris with no hero, a year before Ruttmann's Berlin. A woman of the streets, a newspaper, meat, a rich couple, the river. Cavalcanti cuts class against class and clock against clock. The city does not tidy itself for him, and he does not ask it to.

1926 · Man Ray

A photographer's film. Rayographs, spinning objects, Kiki's eyes, a pair of legs, light on type. The title means leave me alone, and the card says so. Sixteen minutes that refuse to summarize.

1928 · Germaine Dulac

The seashell. Artaud wrote it, Dulac shot it, Artaud disowned it, and his friends shouted her down at the premiere. The British censor called it meaningless and, if it had a meaning, objectionable. A clergyman, a general's wife, doors, a key. A year before the razor.

1928 · Jean Epstein

Poe in slow motion. Roderick paints Madeleine until the sitting looks like a burial, and the house does what the title promises. Dust, a guitar string, curtains moving in no wind. Buñuel was the assistant and quit over how literal to be. Epstein photographs the decay and does not explain it.

1928 · Marcel L'Herbier

L'Herbier mortgaged his house for this and sent the camera through the Bourse and down from its dome. Brigitte Helm, imported after Metropolis, as the wife who will not stay bought. Over two hours, and the stock exchange sequence is the reason. Money as architecture, filmed from above.

1928 · René Clair

A horse eats a hat and a wedding party sits downstairs for the rest of the film. Clair times doors the way he timed the frozen city. The avant-garde's playfulness aimed at a paying crowd, and the crowd came. Watch the wedding guests, who never learn what is wrong and never stop being wrong about it.

1929 · Luis Buñuel

The razor. Buñuel and Dalí wrote from dreams and threw out anything that could be explained. Ants in a hand, pianos with priests and dead donkeys, a couple in sand. Sixteen minutes, stones in Buñuel's pockets in case the crowd charged. It has a running time and a first-night crowd. It does not have a meaning, and it says so.