Ménilmontant

France

1926

38 Min

Black and White

Silent

Currently 4.4/5 Stars.
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DP Dimitri Kirsanoff, Léonce Crouan

CAST Nadia Sibirskaïa, Yolande Beaulieu, Guy Belmont, Jean Pasquier, Maurice Ronsard

Dimitri Kirsanoff’s film centers on two young country girls who flee to the city after their parents are brutally murdered (we are given very few details as to who did this or why). The film’s narrative is very sketchy, as there are no intertitles, and the two girls have similar features and are dressed similarly throughout most of the film. One of the girls, played by the wonderful Nadia Sibirskaia (Kirsanoff’s wife), goes off with a man while her sister stays home in their tenement. When she returns home she soon has a baby, and her sister goes off (presumably as a prostitute) with the man. Sibirskaia presumably becomes homeless until she is ultimately reunited with her sister. The man they went away with earlier shows up again, only to be killed by a random criminal. —mseverson

Director

Dimitri Kirsanoff

Dimitri Kirsanoff (Russian: Дими́трий Кирса́нов) (6 March 1899 – 11 February 1957) was an early filmmaker, considered part of the French Impressionist movement in film. He is known for his inexpensively made experimental films.

Kirsanoff was born Markus David Sussmanovitch Kaplan (Маркус Давид Зусманович Каплан) in Tartu (then Juryev), Estonia, then Russian Empire in 1899. In the early 1920s he moved to Paris and became involved in cinema through playing cello in the orchestra at showings. He began making films on his own, and never worked with a production company. —Wikipedia

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In Delirium

7Apr13

Pure perfection.

Aguaespejo

15Mar13

The camerawork seems to be trying to express something tremulous and evanescent, perhaps something that only a return to childhood can symbolize. Perhaps the parataxes in the narrative are striving for that same sense. There is no cause and effect here, only memory and expectation. And Sibirskaia is something wondrous to behond! The scene on the park bench is priceless.