Ménilmontant (1926)
Directed by Dimitri Kirsanoff

Film Review

In lists of the avant-garde French filmmakers who committed themselves to exploring the artistic possibilities of cinema in its early years the one name that tends to get overlooked most often is that of Dimitri Kirsanoff.  An émigré from Imperial Russia, Kirsanoff's interest in cinema began when he started playing in an orchestra at screenings of silent films in the early 1920s.  He made his first film, L'Ironie du destin, in 1923, which he followed up three years later with the film for which he is best known, Ménilmontant.  Although clearly influenced by the work of his contemporaries - most notably Abel Gance and Sergei Eisenstein - Kirsanoff was able to bring something new to the still pliable medium of cinema.  In Ménilmontant, he masterfully combines sophisticated montage techniques and camera effects to transform a conventional melodrama into a dazzling subjective experience, throughout which our senses and feelings are assailed by a chaotic flurry of impressions.  Watching the film is as exhilarating and scarily unfamiliar as walking through a hailstorm in your pyjamas during a hurricane.

Kirsanoff's early films are a sublime example of what has come to be known as 'impressionistic cinema'.  Abel Gance, Germaine Dulac, Jean Epstein, Marcel L'Herbier and Louis Delluc all dabbled with impressionism but Kirsanoff is arguably the only filmmaker who made it central to his art and revealed just how powerful a form of cinematic expression it could be.  In the films of Gance and Dulac, impressionistic devices such as superimposition, skewed camera angles and slow motion are used tentatively, arbitrarily and sometimes unnecessarily, but for Kirsanoff (and to an almost equal degree Epstein) impressionism is the heart and soul of his oeuvre, not an afterthought or calculated embellishment.  There is a level of consistency and confidence in Kirsanoff's impressionism which is hard to find in the work of his avant-garde peers.

Ménilmontant is the one impressionistic film that can definitely be labelled a timeless masterpiece.  Whereas many of the films of the Parisian avant-garde of the 1920s now appear pretentious, florid or lacking in artistic coherence, Ménilmontant has a reality and solidity to it that makes it an intensely absorbing human drama as well as an incredibly daring piece of cinema art.  The film opens with a dramatic hook that cannot fail to grab the attention.  Using the 'accelerated montage' that Gance had employed so brilliantly in his film La Roue (1923), Kirsanoff hurls us headfirst into the bloody arena of an axe murder.  Just as in the shower scene in Hitchcock's Psycho (1960), the frenzied editing mirrors the ferocity of the axe attack, so that every cut feels like a murderous blow.  The reaction of one of the victims' daughters to the murder reinforces our sense of horror and disbelief - this is made more viscerally affecting through a combination of a zoom and jump-cut close-up.  The same device is used later in the film when the same girl witnesses her betrayal by her lover, one of several instances in which the film wraps back on itself like a Möbius strip, connecting past and present.

The inability of the two daughters of the axe victims to escape their past becomes the film's central theme and is evident when they have settled in Ménilmontant, a working class neighbourhood of Paris set on a hill overlooking the capital.  The narrow cobbled streets, drab and featureless, come to resemble a prison, and in one scene one of the sisters is seen chalking marks on a wall, as a prisoner might to mark the years of his incarceration.  One sister is seduced and abandoned by a good-for-nothing Don Juan, left with an unwanted baby and driven to the brink of suicide, only to witness her older sibling being lured down the same track.  The film ends as it begins, with a crime of passion - the wheel turns full circle with one brutal killing exorcising, or maybe reinforcing, the memory of another.

One of the most striking features of the film is how much is left unsaid.  There are no inter-titles, so Kirsanoff leaves it to the spectator to interpret the plot ellipses and ambiguities in whatever way he or she chooses.  The film also has an extraordinary degree of economy.  There is not a second in the film that is wasted, not a shot that is superfluous.  There are sequences where the pace is dizzying frenetic - the most spectacular being the first glimpse of the busy metropolis, where the camera moves so fast that all we see is a confused blur of activity - but there are also moments of exquisite stillness.  The most heart-warming scene is the one in which the younger sister shares a meal with an old tramp on a park bench.  Homeless and penniless, the young woman seeks temporary refuge from her present misery by dreaming of a life of luxury.  When she returns to reality, she is cheered when a stranger takes pity on her and, without a word, offers her a few scraps of food.  What makes the scene so memorable and so poignant is the near-documentary reality that Nadia Sibirskaia (Kirsanoff's wife and muse at the time) brings to it.  As she gratefully chews on the morsels of food, the camera frames her adoringly and makes her an icon of female suffering.

With the two sisters apparently reunited through their separate misfortunes at the end of the film, are we to assume that they have now put their unhappy past behind them, or, from the ominous closing shot of the Seine dissolving into darkness, are we to conclude that further misfortunes lie ahead?  Dimitri Kirsanoff signs off his most perfect film with a teasing question mark and you are left not only stunned by his artistry but also wondering how he managed to compress such an epic tale on the cruelty of existence into such a small space.  Ménilmontant is a film that, once seen, will never leave you.

Film Synopsis

The peace of a rural community is shattered when a man and his wife are violently attacked and murdered with an axe by a deranged killer.  At the time, the couple's two daughters are blissfully unaware of their parents' fate - they are occupied trying to recover a cat that has climbed up a tree.  Some years later, the sisters try to make a new life for themselves, working as flower sellers in a busy working class district of Paris, Ménilmontant.  One day, the younger sister meets a handsome young Lothario, who wastes no time seducing her.  By the time she realises she is pregnant, the young woman has been abandoned by her lover and she is shocked to learn that he has begun an affair with her sister...