Ménilmontant

An oddly arresting French Impressionist film. Like so many independent avant-garde directors, Kirsanoff started off with an early love of Gance-inspired montage at its most frenzied (this is instantly clear from the brutally abrupt ax-murder opening, and carries through to later scenes combining city streets, alarm clocks, and sex to surprisingly coherent effect). Alternating such moments with some slower, beautifully handled character sequences makes for a prepossessing whole.

A wordless film that excels in visual expression. It stands on two legs: The unforgettable performance of Nadia Sibirskaia (AKA the woman who perpetually has her fingers on her lips), and the moody cinematography, which has every kind of shot and makes totally warranted usage of tricks like double exposure.

A visually rich film with a haunting soundtrack, it follows the tragic life of two sisters through a well edited series of silent scenes. It took me about half the movie to get a sense of what was going on because of the complete lack of intertitles, but once I did it was a very rich and moving experience.

Evocative short that starts with a bang and has some great moments, but was ultimately a tad too avant garde for me to really love it. A lot of the editing and camerawork is quite modern and the performances are pretty good. Worth seeing for sure.

At the end of her life, Pauline Kael said this was her favorite movie of all time, and one can easily see why ("In one scene she is seated on a park bench next to an old man who surreptitiously shares his food with her--it's as great as anything in Chaplin."). Perhaps not the most original story, but the art is in the way it's told. I kept thinking the camera technique and editing owed a huge debt to "Man with a Movie Camera"--until I realized that was made 3 years AFTER this.

A couple are brutally murdered. Their 2 young daughters grow up and live together in the Ménilmontant neighborhood of Paris where they both fall for the same young thug. Interesting enough as a short film, but significant for how many novel visual tricks it uses, like double exposure shots. Nadia Sibirskaïa, director Dimitri Kirsanoff's wife, is radiant and steals the film.

the scene that woman and stranger guy sat on a bench is one of the most dramatic scene i have ever seen.

Salt Beyoğlu.

Too frenetic at the beginning to my tastes. Then gets better. Must have been amazing at the time.

Life in the big city of Paris ain't all gravy.

i have no idea what i missed the first time. i don't know if i even watched the whole thing. it follows a young woman who, after her parents' murder, moves to the city and becomes impregnated by some asshole. simple, and yet told with such delicacy and beauty.

At times it has a kinetic energy that showcases some of the best editing from its time, not to mention some riveting imagery. But at other times it lingers on instances for too long and becomes dull, and the story is pretty damn uninteresting -- I'm not sure how many times it had been done back then, but it's been done better over and over again since the 1920s.

#892

Harika bir giris sekansi. Sessiz sinema donemi biraz daha uzun surse sinema cok farkli yerlerde olurdu belki.

Part avant-garde and french-soviet montage, part realism and honesty; achieves moments of purity and it's true in spite of its melodrama. This mix shouldn't work so well. Direction of actors goes a long way, and the montage goes quiet as it progresses. The idea probably was the visualization of interior sentiment, directly.

With its disturbing ambiance and timeless acting, the film immediately swallows the viewer in a void-like gloom. The opening murder sequence is still genuinely disturbing and far more horrifying than most attempts in the modern horror genre. For a film so short and so old, it's one of the most compelling works of cinema I've ever seen.

This had a plot? :D

Rather dull, although it has a nice poetic sadness to it. Not as avant-garde as I expected.