Ménilmontant + Shorts (12A*)

The programme is anchored by Dimitri Kirsanoff’s masterpiece Ménilmontant’, pure melodrama in terms of story – two sisters move to Paris from the country where they are drawn into a tragic love triangle – but utterly extraordinary in execution.

The plot is communicated entirely with imagery, without recourse to intertitles, and, most startlingly we open in medias res right in the thick of an axe murder conveyed in near-abstract montage. Thereafter Kirsanoff uses a wide palette of avant-garde techniques, all the while making lyrical, melancholy use of settings, especially the desolate working-class Parisian district of the film’s title.

Ménilmontant screens here with the director’s later short Autumn Mists (1928) and a selection of works by his contemporary, Germaine Dulac, with music composed by the Electronic & Produced Music Department.