Ménilmontant (1926) User Reviews

Superb example of silent film making

[paul_bowes2003 · 8/10 · 14 November 2005]

Although the film is excellent in all its aspects, the best thing about 'Menilmontant' is arguably the central performance by Nadia Sibirskaia; her acting during the episode in which her character is contemplating suicide is extraordinary. The story is simple to the point of cliché but given a surrealist edge by the framing acts of unexplained violence. The film gathers depth and resonance as it proceeds. As with all of the best silent films, one is not conscious of the 'absence' of the spoken word.

I would happily recommend Kirsanoff's film to any newcomer to serious film making of the 1920s. It is notable for its restraint in portraying powerful emotions. In the version mentioned below, the film is enhanced by a deeply sympathetic score (not always the case).

I saw this film on the Kino Video DVD 'Avant-Garde: Experimental Cinema of the 1920s and 1930s - Films from the Raymond Rohauer Collection' (2 disks, K402 DVD). Black and white silent film with musical accompaniment. 37 minutes running time. This collection, which I recommend, includes another, shorter film by Kirsanoff, 'Brumes d'Automne', in which Sibirskaia makes another memorable appearance, and which confirms Kirsanoff's talent.

A Striking, Disturbing Masterpiece.

[FerdinandVonGalitzien · 9/10 · 21 May 2008]

There is an old German proverb that says that size doesn't matter ( well, size does count for this count having in mind the perimeter of his Teutonic heiresses… ) and the saying rings true with "Ménilmontant" a medium-length silent film directed by Herr Dimitri Kirsanoff, and a striking, disturbing masterpiece.

Herr Kirsanoff's direction is astonishing in every aspect of the film, particularly in its technique. It's a mixture of drama, avant-garde, experimental film and hyper realism. The story depicted in the film ( the terrible life of two orphan sisters ) doesn't allow any concession to the audience; to watch "Ménilmontant" today still invokes amazement, distress and an infinite sadness.

From the very start of the film ( superb, striking and masterful editing by Herr Kirsanoff himself ) the director shows power and imagination and a strong control of film narrative ( there is no need of intertitles ). Kiransoff's use of imagery is thrilling and brilliant. Images emphasize a ruined happy childhood and the duality and dangers of a big city ( flashbacks, imaginative camera angles, dreamy and poetic shots ) not to mention the sorrowful life of the two orphans, an existence of loneliness, abandonment and despair that broke the heart of a heartless German aristocrat, especially the superb scene in which the younger sister ( touching Dame Nadia Sibirskaia ) ,alone and hungry on a bench park with her baby, accepts some bread from an old man, a moving and lyrical scene, that summarizes the spirit and achievement of this oeuvre.

"Ménilmontant" is a work of art, a striking experimental style in the service of a tragic and sad story, brilliantly and disturbingly balanced.

And now, if you'll allow me, I must temporarily take my leave because this German Count must become a little livelier.

Herr Graf Ferdinand Von Galitzien http://ferdinandvongalitzien.blogspot.com/

A tale of two sisters.

[brogmiller · 9/10 · 18 April 2022]

The Ménilmontant depicted here by Dimitri Kirsanofff is a far cry from the picturesque village of Charles Trenet's famous chanson. The grim and narrow cobbled streets provide a backdrop for a film of which the subject matter is that of conventional melodrama but which has been raised by Dimitri Kirsanoff to the level of cinematic art.

The stylistic effects he employs are those of Impressionism, notably rapid montage, superimposition and flashbacks but never at the expense of the narrative and nigh-on a century later the film's emotive power has not diminished and remains a devastating piece of social realism which concerns two orphaned sisters who are eventually reconciled, having been betrayed by the same man.

Suffice to say the lynchpin is the director's wife and muse Nadia Sibirskaia whose face is adored by the camera and whose performance as the younger sister is stunning in its simplicity.

The mood of the film is heightened by the newly composed score of the talented Paul Mercer.

This is the second and indeed oldest surviving film of Russian émigré Kirsanoff and although to my knowledge he never again reached such heights this piece of ciné poetry guarantees his immortality.

A rarely-seen masterpiece that deserves an audience.

[mseverson · 10/10 · 4 October 2002]

I think "Menilmontant" is one of the great masterpieces of the silent era, and upon reading the comments posted, felt that it needed a little support. (If for nothing else than to encourage other people to seek it out, if not on video -- currently the only videos of this film have copied it at the wrong projection, thereby cranking up the film's speed and changing the running time from approximately 35 to 20 mins. -- than at a local museum or revival house; at least until someone puts out a definitive copy on video or DVD.)

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.

The film's slim and fragmented plot does nothing to convey the extraordinary and evocative world Kirsanoff creates through a barrage of disparate techniques lifted from German expressionism, Soviet montage, Hollywood melodrama, and the French avant-garde. The opening massacre is shown through a rapid Eisenstein-inspired montage; the compression of time and dreamlike waywardness of the girls' journey is presented through a series of lap dissolves; and the wintry, desolate atmosphere of Menilmontant (a poor, working class district on the eastern edge of Paris) is conveyed by an impressionistic use of documentary footage.

The film's most celebrated sequence occurs while Sibirskaia is wandering destitute on the streets of Paris (after contemplating drowning herself and her baby). Alone at night on a park bench, the young mother is cold and hungry, when an old man with a cane sits down on the bench next to her. The old man quietly shares some of his bread with her (never looking at her, he only lays the scraps and pieces on the bench separating them). The desperate girl tearfully accepts the food, and smiles, though the man barely looks her way. It's an extraordinarily sad and moving sequence that has echoes of Chaplin, but without that comedian's maudlin approach to sentiment. Sibirskaia's performance here is wonderfully nuanced and naturalistic -- there's very little of the histrionics usually associated with much silent film acting -- and she possesses a face that rivals Lillian Gish. The only comparable sequence I can think of is in Ozu's great 1935 silent film, An Inn in Tokyo.

In spite of its short length, this a film overflowing with riches. It ranks with the best films of any year.

Menilmontant constitutes a forceful avant-garde re-cutting of the melodrama. Cuts are central. Violence is visceral!

[Ziggy5446 · 10/10 · 11 November 2008]

Menilmontant (1926) was, in the modest context of the alternative cinema circuit, a smash hit. It's great success allowed filmmaker Dimitri Kirsanov to go on making films, and also helped Jean Tedesco to stay in business as an exhibitor.

Like Kirsanov's first film, Menilmontant (again starring Kirsanoff's first wife, the beautiful Nadia Sibirskaia) tells a story without the use of inter-titles. It is often said that the filmmakers cinema is poetic, but one must add that in his second film he explored the poetics of violence and degradation.

The story begins and ends with two unrelated, but similarly filmed and edited murders. In each case, the grisly event does not grow organically out of the plot, but seems to surge out of a world welling with violent impulses.

Menilmontant uses practically all of the typical stylistic devices of cinematic impressionism, but it is hard to consider it as in any way representative of the movement. It's overwhelming, virtually unrelieved violence and despair seem to infect its own storytelling agency, upsetting what in other filmmakers' works would be clearly delineated relations of parts to the whole.

The film contains several bursts of rapid editing, for example, but they are not rhythmic in any simple, narratively justified way (in the manner of Abel Gance, for example); their meter is complicated and unsettling, worthy of an Igor Stravinsky. The film offers several notable examples of subjective camera work, but typically these become slightly unhinged, with no absolute certainty as to which character's experience in being rendered.

Menilmontant is, quite deliberately, a film in which the formal center cannot hold, because it is about a world in which this is also true. Although certainly not a Surrealist work, it shares with Surrealism no only a fascination with violence and sexuality, but also a display of forces and transcend, and question the boundaries of, individual human consciousness.

Kirsanov concluded his Menilmontant with a shot of impoverished and exploited young women fashioning artificial flowers in the poorest district of Paris, he provided us the most comprehensive image, aesthetic and social, of this form of cinema. Through a panoply of stylistic experiments and through glorious close-ups of the incomparably fragile face of Sibirskaia, Kirsanov thought he had shaped a harsh milieu into an exquisite flower. But a flower for whom? Menilmontant would become a major film on the cine-club and specialized cinema circuit, but never played to the people of the working class quatier that gave it its title. This was not Kirsanov's public anyway, for he came from the Russian aristocracy. In 1919, having fled the Revolution, he was reduced to playing his beloved cello in movie houses just to be able to eat. He must have been tempted to imagine himself and his music as an unappreciated flower in the crude milieu of mass art.

Seen this way, Menilmontant becomes a personal triumph of art over industry, of the icon of Sibirskaia over the brutal world of plot and spectacle that constitutes ordinary cinema. That triumph is signaled in the miracle of the film's narration, the first French film without titles, a tale told completely through the eloquence of its images. The dark alleys of the nineteenth arrondissment, the streetlights listening on the Seine, and the pathetic decor of shabby apartments are all redeemed by art. No silent film more clearly bewails the fate of art in our century, more obviously appeals to connoisseurs of the emotions roused by artificial flowers.

The way she nodded was grace

[sandover · 10/10 · 24 July 2010]

Poverty, disillusion, and yet grace graces the screen when Nadia Sibirskaya nods to the old man who offers her some food to chew. That scene, that means her social grace, brought me tears and elated me at once - miracles, oh yes, do and do happen and move.

One should note that the old man does not reciprocate, in fact does not look at her at all, and this marks Kirsanoff's extraordinary finesse: if there was some kind of "communication" between the two, THIS would be melodramatic; for I do not think this film is a melodrama, at least the way we have come to mean one. To deny that the story is something that could have "happened", is to deny the film's class and émigré conscience.

On the other hand I am not sure I would claim, as another reviewer did, that this is Zola-like; we would then be a bit far from "Menilmontant"'s drastic, dislocated lyricism.

Watch the cutting close-ups the two times Sibirskaya's eloquent face witnesses a violent scene: the camera, a bit dislocated each time, and unafraid to jump and shut transitive seconds.

Watch the scene where she strongly contemplates something and starts descending the steps to the river: there is a sense of menace and imminent loss, I am not sure I ever witnessed before in a film: this is film-making on the heights; as is the camera work which frames hesitant feet on the steps, and hushes astonishingly their turning round.

Watch the protagonist's face after she arguably loses her virginity: inscrutable and fascinating, not allowing us truly tell if the vision of her wandering in the woods is one of innocence lost or burgeoning sexuality. But there is, that is a visceral sense of feminine enjoyment, perhaps close to a Balthus painting mood.

At the end one is left with a sense of bifurcation: with sisters reconciled, we are left with a confusing and not redeeming crime. We don't know who or why exactly and if the girl involves herself out of vengeance, private reasons or what you will; that makes it all the more unsavory and artistically right.

Then the camera looks disjointedly up into the Parisian sky, and hands resume their work of artificial bouquets; yes, the film seems to suggest, this is all what one is left with, artificial bouquets and handiwork.

Two sisters, two deflorations, two crimes, twice the work of flowers: the work of the two Kirsanoffs genial, amazing sensibilities.

Two-worlds (arriving before oneself)

[chaos-rampant · 1 October 2015]

This is one that no one can afford to miss in a lifetime of viewing, that is no one who's interested in the deepest workings of how things move. In my third viewing now, it may just be the pinnacle of the first 30 years. But before saying more, let's quickly clear the air from fixed perceptions so it can rise up in front of us vibrantly as what it is, all the more greater.

First to reclaim it from the museum of merely academic appreciation that covers, silents in particular, with the shroud of musky relic. Coming to us from so far back it may appear as the studied work of a venerable master - and yet it's the work of a 25 year old (filming started in '24) who shot it by himself with his girl around Paris, hand-held, and edited in camera.

The workings of fate or grande history that demand crowds and decor are pushed to the side, this is a youthful cinema ("indie" we would call it now) that beats with the heart of young people trying to fathom life in the complex city and I urge you see it as such. Kirsanov was an émigré new to Paris after all. Watch it as puzzling modern life that keeps you awake at nights, not as some scholar's symbolism.

Then to reclaim it from the clutches of "experimental" and "avant- garde", labels as though it were just about the tweaking of form, an exercise of trying to be ahead of time. There are many of those from the era, marvelous experiments in seeing, and Kirsanov was not just a wide-eyed country boy - he had articles published on "photogenie" before he made this and would know the radical tropes. But this enters beyond.

The best way I find myself able to describe it is this.

There's a story here that you can unfold in a way that it makes simple sense, melodrama about an orphaned girl lost in the big city. Melodrama since well before of course, offered us a certain facsimile of life where this clearly begat that, the disparity caused grief, the resolutions restored clarity. There's a heart breaking scene here on a bench worthy of Chaplin. She wanders with a baby cradled in her arms, trials and tribulations that innocence must go through.

Now this facsimile rippled and violently tossed about like curtains at an open window are shuffled by gusts of air, ellipsis, abstraction, rapid-fire montage, and all the other tools that Kirsanov would have known from being in Paris at the time of Epstein and others. So far so good. The film would have been great with just this mode, wholly visual, "experimental". The girl Nadia is lovely, the air dreamlike.

But there's something else he does, that is still in the process of being fathomed decades later by penetrative thinkers like Lynch. There are hidden machinations in the world of the film, illogical machinery at play, that turn at a level deeper than we can clearly fathom at any point. You should know here that Kirsanov had to cross a Europe collapsing by war and revolutions to reach Paris, he would have found out months after he left home that his father had been murdered on the street by communist thugs.

Suddenly there is the nagging sense of a presence that moves behind appearances, giving rise to mysteriously connected perturbations. A marvelous sequence shows one sister being seduced in a room (uncertain, but giving in), the other sister alone in their bed reading from a book as if daydreaming the whole dalliance.

And then the second sister knowingly letting herself be seduced, the first observing the scene from below as if she has splintered off into separate selves, one being seduced above, the other realizing in hallucinative daydream the mistake of giving herself to this boy.

This is marvelous. Impulses from an open window, and through the flimsy fabric of the curtains, the vague coming and going of people in a room, half-finished glimpses, but we begin to sense pattern here. Two girls, two murders, two seductions, but one calculated and wrong.

The most startling moment is the opening; a puzzling violence has stolen into this world, creating the story, rendered with haunting imagery of a struggle before a window. Now every account of the film I've read believes these are the parents of the girls and some madman, but this is not said anywhere. In the graveyard after, we see the father's grave with wreaths, a funeral that day, but none on the mother's, it looks abandoned. Maybe someone was caught where he shouldn't have been, calculated and wrong.

And this veiled and bubbling causality goes through everything to appear again in the finale; the first murder wasn't random, what says the second is? Maybe a holdup just so happened to visit him, maybe someone was paid off. The door is open, you go in where your body takes you.

Something to meditate upon

Virtuosic, Zolaesque - UNFETTERED CINEMA !

[oOgiandujaOo_and_Eddy_Merckx · 10/10 · 17 October 2006]

Watched Dimitri Kirsanoff's Ménilmontant last night. It's right out of the top drawer. Filmed in 1926 when the rubric for making a film was not yet set, the rules not there to be broken. You can sense the sheer vitality that the filmmaker is enabled with because of this. It feels like a Zola novel, a great portrait of urban life, and also a valuable document of the way Paris looked at the time. Kirsanoff is not weighed down by cinematic antecedents, there are no Hitchockian homages, no cinematic in-jokes, no nods to popular culture, no product placement. This makes the film alive with atmosphere, almost overflowing with it. Somehow Mr Kirsanoff places you in the film, makes you an insider to the innocence of childhood, the loneliness of the big city, the despair of poverty, the shock of betrayal.

His camera is like the Kino-Eye, and it looks at things the way real people look at them, making it the least phallic use of a camera that I have seen. The shots of the Seine, of the countryside, of Ménilmontant, and the roving, lingering, pace of the camera were quite literally breath-taking. There are no intertitles in this silent movie, and the plot is a little opaque, but really this is not taking the movie on its own terms, it is a masterpiece of camera-work and editing and provides the most atmosphere of any movie I have ever seen. It is ESSENTIAL to watch this movie at its 38 minute pace. I saw it on the double-disc Kino edition of Avant-garde: Experimental Cinema of the 1920s and 30s. This is the best value for money DVD on the market full stop.

Recently I watched Lang's The Testament of Dr Mabuse and became aware through his virtuosic use of sound, how taken for granted sound is in movies these days. Watching Ménilmontant makes you realise how taken for granted image is, most of modern cinema is simply about dubious storytelling to quote something I heard on TV, "…it's a cultural wasteland filled with inappropriate metaphors and an unrealistic portrayal of life created by the liberal media elite". I recommend this movie to all lovers of cinema, it really is a movie that can make you once again enthuse about the moving image.

Disorientating visual poetry

[ackstasis · 7/10 · 6 December 2008]

Dimitri Kirsanoff, born in Estonia but operating mostly in Paris, was heavily influenced by the theories of Soviet Montage. In his most famous short film, 'Ménilmontant (1926)' – still frightfully obscure in most circles – he adheres to this style strictly, almost obsessively. His preference towards a brisk editing pace carries a unique vitality that is also seen in the work of Soviet masters Eisenstein and Vertov, who pioneered and perfected the technique of montage in the mid-to-late 1920s. But, nevertheless, I don't think it works quite as well here. 'The Battleship Potemkin (1925)' and 'The Man with the Movie Camera (1929) – perhaps the two most recognised works of Soviet montage – utilise their chosen editing style to full effect precisely because they place greater emphasis on the collective over the individual, in accordance with traditional Communist ideology. There is deliberately no emotional connection attempted nor made between the viewer and any individual movie character, for that would be contrary to the filmmaker's intentions (interestingly, however, the montage fell out of preference from the 1930s in favour of Soviet realism).

'Ménilmontant' falters because it strives to create an emotional connection with the characters (particularly the younger sister, played by Nadia Sibirskaïa), but Kirsanoff's chosen editing style continually keeps the audience at an arm's length. The closest he comes to true pathos is with the park-bench sequence, when an old man offers some bread and meat to the famished woman, delicately avoiding eye contact to preserve her dignity. Even in this scene, the montage style intrudes. A director like Chaplin (and I'm a romantic at heart, so he's naturally one of favourite filmmakers) would have placed the camera at a distance, framing the profiles of both the woman and the old man within the same shot, thus capturing the subtle emotions and inflections of both parties simultaneously. Kirsanoff somewhat confuses the scene, cutting sequentially between the woman, the man and the food in a manner that reduces a simple, poignant act of kindness into a technical exercise in film editing. It works adequately, of course, a precise demonstration of the Kuleshov Effect, but there's relatively little heart in it.

But we'll cease with my complaints hereafter. I know my own film tastes well enough to recognise that what I disliked about the film – its emotional distance, for example – represents precisely what others love about it. There's no doubting that the photography (when it's kept on screen long enough) is breathtakingly spectacular, making accomplished use of lighting, shadows and in-camera optical effects such as dissolves, irises and superimpositions. There are touches of the surreal. Kirsanoff cuts non-discriminately forwards in time, backwards and into his characters' dreams, fragmenting time and reality into a series of shattered images, their individual meanings obscure until considered sequentially as in the pieces of a puzzle. Most impressive, I thought, was how several shots captured the linear perspective of roads and alleys, watching his characters gradually depart into the distance as though merely following the predetermined pathways of their future. The film ends exactly as it begins – with a bloody and unexplained murder – suggesting the inevitable cycle of human suffering, its causes unknown and forever incomprehensible.

Tragedy

[Polaris_DiB · 10/10 · 6 April 2006]

After the violent and brutal death of their parents, two sisters leave to the big city to live. There, one of the sisters falls in love with a young man, but he is unfaithful and she is left having to deal with her own lost dreams and a baby without a job or a friend.

This is an interesting experimental film. It shows a lot more violence and sex than typically shown at the time, and yet it is very contemplative and serene in parts. However, as a subject of lost dreams, mostly it's very tragic. The image of interest here is the recurring motif of water. Water seems to provide all of the "insanity," including the boy seemingly coming from a spilt water barrel and a long montage of the woman contemplating something drastic as she looks out over the river.

It's powerfully affecting. It's strongest when hectic, during death or violence (beginning and end) or the sudden change from the serene quiet of the country to the speed and confusion of the city. It is a tragedy in every way, as lives are shattered in one way or another until a rather biting climax.

--PolarisDiB

Very good images but uninteresting plot

[jmanuelsl · 6/10 · 5 November 2005]

Very good, if little known, film from the last years of silent cinema. The beginning is as powerful as anything in the classic Russians but in a very new wave way; the acting is great from Sibirskaia who looks really as Gish, even she acts sometimes as if she were a Griffith heroine (in the worst sense), but most of the time she is wonderful and amazingly beautiful. She has two or three awful scenes as a 10 years old girl, as bad as anything in Griffith but don't let them spoil the whole film. The best thing about this film are the images, so much filled with small and precious details (which have nothing to do with the plot) as a poem by Verlaine. A must. There is a scene in a park with old man and baby that for me didn't work, mainly because at that point I wasn't thinking in the plot or characters anymore (nor the director, I think, till that very moment, and it's just too late). You can't spend half an hour in details (however wonderful they are) and then make an emotional scene.

Modern artists and poets

[ilpohirvonen · 10/10 · 4 December 2010]

French Avantgarde is one of the most influential movements in the history of cinema alongside with Soviet Montage Cinema, Hollywood silent cinema, French impressionism, German expressionism and French poetic realism. French Avantgarde was the movement of modern artists and poets. In it artists tried to combine poetry with narrative and fiction with reality. Menilmontant by Dimitri Kirsanoff also belongs to the French impressionism but yet it is considered to be one of the finest products of French Avantgarde. It's a good example how the transition from ordinary narrative to experimental locutions started to happen. Kirsanoff was a musician and an Estonian immigrant living in Paris so he perfectly fit in this movement of modern artists and poets.

Menilmontant is a drama of two orphanage sisters, both of whom are seduced by a handsome stranger and about the sisters' hopeless vision of future: prostitution or dull work. This simple story resurrects a lyric atmosphere of emotions. The emotions of the sisters are reflected to impressive images of empty streets which represent loneliness and the crowded streets which represent a state of happiness.

Many scenes and sequences of Menilmontant reach different kind of impressions and feelings as cinema's counterpart for poetry. Obviously French Avantgarde has influenced many filmmakers and made them create cinematic poetry. Jean Renoir, Santiago Alvarez, Jean Cocteau, Georges Franju and Luis Bunuel to mention a few. The opening sequence of Menilmontant is a 40 seconds long series of short shots, which can easily be compared with Soviet Montage Cinema (Eisenstein and Vertov). Kirsanoff tried out the dimensions of cinema and narrative and created an absolutely beautiful piece of art, which still today stands out as one of the greatest French Avantgarde films ever made.

Not My Cup of Tea

[gavin6942 · 6/10 · 5 January 2017]

A couple is brutally murdered in the working-class district of Paris. Later on, the narrative follows the lives of their two daughters, both in love with a Parisian thug and leading them to separate ways.

This film has probably been given additional viewing because Pauline Kael apparently claimed it was her all-time favorite. And since Kael is arguably the greatest film critic ever (with all due respect to Ebert and Agee), this carries weight. And, indeed, it does have something going for it.

Besides the double exposure technique, which was somewhat advanced for the time, where I think it really excels is the lack of intertitles. This makes the plot a bit more universal, and viewers can take from it what they please without seeing it as "French" or anything else.

Vastly overrated melodrama, notable for editing and visuals

[edwartell · 5/10 · 24 December 2000]

Kirsanoff's tiresome melodrama goes on for 20 minutes. There are some admirable things here: no title cards, well composed shots. But the quality of the print, combined with the rapid-fire montage (Kirsanoff being inspired by Soviet editing), makes for a headache. His story, the melodrama of a cad and two women who sleep with him, and a third one who dies, isn't particularly new, interesting or insightful. And a scene about eating sausage goes nowhere. Pauline Kael, that critical fraud, stated a couple of years ago that, at the moment, this was the greatest movie she'd ever seen. If you belong to the cult of Ms. Kael and haven't seen this movie, you can find it on the New York Film Annex's video series of Experimental Films, on #18. But it's not worth it.

Menilmontant, a development in storytelling with film...

[fredgrogan · 8 March 2002]

Dmitri Kirsinov's Menilmontant is considered to be a landmark in the art of film-making. The story is sparse, melodramatic, and brief. The film is barely twenty minutes long. A young girl leaves home after a somewhat vague hatchet murder takes place. She spends time in the seedy streets of Menilmontant, a medieval suburb of Paris. She drifts through a relationship with her sister and man friend.

If you are looking for a strong story and character development, you may be missing the point. Kirsanov was trying to manipulate images in such a way as to get a reaction from his viewer. The bigger story is just a convention on which to hang his moody images. The axe murder with its choppy editing is a very early use of this sort of emotive technique. You are one moment under the flailing axe, interleaved with fast cuts of a howling victim. Later in the film the younger sister is the center of a blurry sensual reverie, her body and her grim surroundings in and out of focus. Silent film as art needs to be taken on its own terms. Kirsanov and other early filmmakers helped to define the way we view, and how we understand the film narrative. That understanding of how the film story works was established quite some time ago, which needs remembering by those of us not around in 1926. It was not foreordained that fast editing, double exposure and other techniques would come into their own. Someone had to prove the power of a restrained use of these formal ideas. Kirsanov did this in 1926.

The art of silent film

[MissSimonetta · 10/10 · 7 March 2016]

Menilmontant (1926) is silent film played to its best advantage, dabbling more in subjective states and a dreamlike atmosphere than the more concrete affair that comes with making a sound movie. The whole thing is like a fascinating dream, pure image, no intertitles. The actors are able to get across every fleeting emotion and nuance without a single word or ounce of verbal/written exposition.

The story is excellent, melodramatic without feeling mawkish or simple. It is a sad tale, but one that includes room for hope and redemption in the final scenes.

Nothing less than a forty minute tour de force.

Film Makes Case Childhood Trauma Carries Over To Adulthood

[springfieldrental · 8/10 · 20 March 2022]

For a good part of three decades, film critic Pauline Kael was one of the most influential movie reviewers in her business. Her pieces, including a stint with the New Yorker from 1968 to 1991, heavily swayed her readers as to what movies to see and how to appreciate them. Her counterpart, Roger Ebert, wrote in tribute after she passed away, stating Kael "had a more positive influence on the climate for film in America than any other single person over the last three decades." Asked in an interview to name her all-time favorite movie, she listed a French short, November 1926's "Menilmontant" as number one.

Written and directed by filmmaker Dimitri Kirsanoff, "Menilmontant," named after a poor working-class district in Paris, follows two young sisters who had witnessed the aftermath of a brutal murder while they were playing in the woods. The image of the scene (not shown on screen) disturbed these two children so much that the incident had an indelible psychological effect carried over into their adult lives. The Younger Sister (Nadia Sibrirskaia) was unable to have a long lasting relationship with men. When she has a brief fling with one, she gets pregnant. The Older Sister (Yolande Beaulieu) becomes a member of the oldest profession in the world and was separated from her sister because of a dispute. The two ping-pong throughout the district as director Kirsanoff follows Nadia trying to survive with her baby during very hard times.

The simple story unfolds as one of the most unique silent films in French cinema. Containing small doses of avant guard visuals, "Menilmontant" anticipates the look and feel of the 1950s New French Wave with a number of jump cuts and swirling camera movements. Kirsanoff steps inside the uneasy mind of Nadia's character with a number of revealing close-ups of her anguished face. The director unravels the film's plot without one solitary inter title.

Labeled as a lyrical film with a poetic framework, "Menilmontant" was the second for Kirsanoff as well as his oldest surviving film. He was one of the rare filmmakers who financed his own movies and never worked for a studio. The Russian-born director continued producing films well into the late 1950s. Kirsanoff married actress Sibirskaia, who played the Younger Sister and was a regular performer in his early movies.

Destroyed me

[BandSAboutMovies · 8/10 · 4 October 2021]

Not all silent movies are silly bits of fluff. Menilmontant begins with the axe murder of its two leads parents, sending the two sisters to Paris and rough neighborhood of the title. They try to survive just by selling artificial flowers, but there's no way that they'll make it.

Director Dimitri Kirsanoff didn't include any dialogue cards in this film, simply using the imagery and the music to tell us the passing of time as the sisters gradually live a more bleam life, including the man that comes between them.

The film closes with another murder - both are rough even today in our world of special effects - as the one sister must give up the child that the man has left her with to her estranged family member, now rich from the very same man that has done so much damage to their bond.

Menilmontant is a striking film and one I would have never seen without Fantastic Fest.

The version that played Fantastic Fest has the score interpreted by House of Waters, which features "Jimi Hendrix of Hammered Dulcimer" Max ZT, Moto Fukushima and Ignacio Rivas Bixio.

Experiment and Tradition

[Screen_O_Genic · 7/10 · 3 March 2023]

One of the earliest Experimental films, "Ménilmontant" highlights a typical love story amidst a flurry of speed and images. An immediately orphaned pair of sisters find themselves enmeshed in a love triangle with no one the better for it. A full circle of death and redemption the film courses through at the start with breathless motion and multiple exposures settling to a normal pace as it progresses. With her fair, round-eyed features, thick curly matted hair and air of sexual ambiguity Nadia Sibirskaïa was quite comely in her Lillan Gish ragamuffin-like look and her fine acting is the clear center and focus of the film. Street scenes of 1920s Paris add a visual treat to this tale of urbanity. Although marred by slow parts the film holds up with its viewability and timeless story. Worth the watch for the history and the film's importance.

Fascination and mistakes

[daviuquintultimate · 6/10 · 8 May 2021]

Everybody is fairly well used to phantasy plots, mistery situations, fairy-tales, avant-garde films, impressionism and expressionism, phantoms suddenly tramplin on the ceiling, zombies and similar...

Any movie whatsoever, whatever genre it belongs to, can be likeable, and sometime a masterpiece. Excluded from these are films with errors, I mean important mistakes in the main plot, contradictions in it: of course, those movies cannot be held as even standard works of art.

"Ménilmontant" is indeed a fascinating movie, with great photography and great turns.

Yet, something leaves me uncomfortable.

Why is the younger sister roaming the streets of the city as if she had no place to go, no house, no shelter? She was living with her sister, a few minutes before (in the film). Why the director hasn't told us anything about her leaving (or not leaving) her sister? This omission doesn't add anything to the film, it rather subtracts something from it. It is just a plain mistake, an error, a contradiction.

What a pity.

Any one that didn't watch the movie should not be retained from watching it, because - in some ways - it is very interesting and good. But if any one has watched it, I think it might happen that she/he could share my opinion.

Forgotten but innovative in many respects

[frankde-jong · 7/10 · 10 August 2023]

"Menilmontant" is named after the Parisian working-class district where it is located. It is about two sisters who both fell in love with the same loverboy.

"Menilmontant" was a favorite film of the renowned filmcritic Pauline Kael, but despite her support the film (and his director) has fallen into oblivion. Today the film is mainly shown in highly specialised festivals.

Director Dimitri Kirsanoff is today almost forgotten. Despite what I said above, "Menilmontant" is at IMDB by far his most popular film measured by votes. Kirsanoff was part of the French impressionist movement, together with better known names such as Abel Gance, Marcel L'Herbier, Jacques Feyder and Jean Epstein.

An important feauture of this silent film is that it contains absolutely no intertitles. The whole story and the corresponding emotions are told using only images. To do this Kirsanoff uses (for that time) innovative techniques of editing.

Reading the reviews it struck me that nobody denied the innovative character of "Menilmontant", but everybody made his own associations.

Some compared the film with associative editing a la Eisenstein from roughly the same period. An example from the film is the way in which images of the (hungry) girl with her baby and the loverboy that has already forgotten the girl are edited right after each other while they are sitting (at differen times) on ths same bank in a Parisian park.

Some compared the film with the Italian neo realist movement from after the Second World War based on the fact that "Montilmontant" is situated in a working class district and portrays the life of the poor.

My own associations where different. The film made me think of "Sunrise" (1927, Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau) but also of "The phantom carriage" (1921, Victor Sjöström).

"Sunrise" because its dynamic portrayel of city life, using the then very heavy camera as though it was a handycam.

"The phantom carriage" because its use of the double exposure technique. In "Menilmontant" this technique is used in a scene where images of city life are combined with (for that time very explicit) images of love making.

Crime, romance and family

[Horst_In_Translation · 4/10 · 30 July 2015]

There is a lot going on in this 90-year-old short film written and directed by Dimitri Kirsanoff. The Estonian-born French filmmaker was only in his 20s when he made this and it was still very early in his career. He only made one film before that. "Ménilmontant" is the name of a french arrondissement and this is where the action takes place apparently. The film starts shockingly right away, especially for standards back then and many people were probably really offended that they put a murder on screen. Méliès, de Chomon, Chaplin, Lloyd and Keaton never would have done that. By 1926, all of these had already moved away from short films and into full feature films or even pretty much stopped making films altogether. There was really only one scene in this film that I quite enjoyed. It was the (stunning) lead character sitting on the bench near the old man who was constantly chewing. Obviously this is not enough for over half an hour and at times, without intertitles, it was fairly difficult to understand what was going on exactly. Not recommended.

Menilmontant review

[JoeytheBrit · 7/10 · 30 June 2020]

A masterfully directed and edited short which makes no use of titles to tell its simple tale of two innocent sisters in Paris who both fall foul of a brutish lover.

MENILMONTANT {Short} (Dimitri Kirsanoff, 1926) ***

[Bunuel1976 · 7/10 · 15 January 2014]

I spent yet another evening watching shorts from Kino's 2-Disc AVANT- GARDE: EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA OF THE 1920s AND '30s Set: this is among the more renowned efforts therein and ranks quite highly on the "Wonders In The Dark" poll of the "All-Time Top 3000 Movies" as well. Still, the end result hardly classifies as an unqualified masterpiece to my eyes...

If anything, it opens with a bang – throwing us smack into the middle of a violent domestic squabble straight out of an Erich von Stroheim melodrama that ends as an axe murder! The film's overall style is indeed comparable, ditto the plot – involving a young woman (the pretty and very expressive Nadia Sibirskaia, also seen here in flashbacks as a carefree teenager!) who is seduced and betrayed by a man (for her less attractive sister), bears his child and ends up living on the streets. Though her sister is herself reduced to prostitution, the heroine – thinking of ending it all – asks her sibling to raise the kid as her own! The man, in the meantime, tries to play his dirty game with yet another woman…but gets more than he bargained for, when her family beat the hell out of him (which is practically where we came in)!

In the end, while undeniably interesting, the intrinsic heaviness of the narrative (at its most maudlin when Sibirskaia (who was married to director Kirsanoff in real-life), taking respite on a park bench one cold morning, shares a bit of bread and sausage with an old man sitting beside her!) is rendered even more tiresome – especially at its not inconsiderable length of 38 minutes – by the experimental yet dreary 'city film' approach then in vogue.