Sur un air de Charleston (1927)
Directed by Jean Renoir

Film Review

With some material left over from his previous film, Nana, Jean Renoir decided to indulge his whim for comic fantasy in this bizarre short film which defies any attempt at rational interpretation.  The film was intended as a surreal tribute to jazz, which Renoir claimed to have just discovered when he made the film.  With a blacked-up lead character and clumsy erotic dances from a semi-nude Catherine Hessling, the film manages to push back the frontier of bad taste by several leagues, but Renoir's humanist treatment of his subject - to say nothing of his bizarre imagination - makes the film an interesting and oddly entertaining curiosity.

Film Synopsis

It is the year 2028, not so long after the world was ravaged by a cataclysmic war.  A tiny spherical aircraft takes off from central Africa and heads towards Europe, a continent devastated by war.  The strange craft lands on top of an advertising column in the centre of what remains of Paris, now a wasteland showing little sign of life.  Living inside the column are two of the city's last remaining survivors - a scantily dressed young woman with flowers in her hair and her pet monkey.  They greet the new arrival - a smartly dressed black man - with amusement and the woman breaks into an impromptu dance.  The dapper explorer is delighted to be reacquainted with the dance of his distant ancestors - the Charleston.  He watches spellbound as the exotic siren thrusts her arms and legs about in a display of wild abandon.

So impressed is the explorer by the woman's performance that he offers himself as her next meal if she will repeat the exhibition for him.  The dancer declines, saying that she never eats black meat.  She ducks inside the column and sketches the outline of a telephone on the inside wall with a stick of chalk.  A real telephone then magically appears and the woman receives a phone call from a female operator, in the form of a woman's head floating in the air on a pair of wings.  Realising that the call is not for her, the dancing woman hands over the phone to the explorer, who enthusiastically reports that he has discovered the Charleston, the traditional dance of the white people.  Eager to learn the dance for himself, the explorer asks the woman to teach him it.

Watched by a strange assembly of winged disembodied heads in the sky, the explorer begins his lesson in earnest and, following his teacher's example, he soon discovers he has rhythm not only in his feet but in every part of his anatomy.  Even the monkey is impressed.  But whereas the wild dancing woman appears to be indefatigable, the explorer soon grows tired.  Completely exhausted, he climbs back into his aircraft, followed by the woman he has now befriended.  As the aircraft ascends into the heavens, heading back to Africa with its precious cargo of white culture, a tearful monkey is left behind in the deserted capital, waving a sad farewell with its handkerchief.