A Film Canon

One of the most impressive avant-garde films of the 1920s, Ménilmontant opens with a graphic double murder that leaves two rural girls orphans, forcing them to flee to Paris. This crime is never contextualised, allowing it to gesture towards the tumultuous passions that inform the subsequent allegory of (adolescent) sexual awakening. Although this is a common avant-garde preoccupation, Kirsanoff refrains from both (cubist) abstraction and (surrealist) symbolism, instead focusing his artistry on an evocative, atmospheric depiction of Paris. In particular, he foregrounds intimate, private spaces (backstreets, laneways, deserted parks), transforming the entire cityscape into a Proustian mindscape, and ensuring that the characters seem perpetually isolated, even (or perhaps especially) when they stray into more crowded areas. Similarly, a pervasive lyricism creates a profound continuity with the initial rural landscape, prioritising the few vestiges of nature (including the two sisters) which remain within the metropolis, in such a way as to render the surrounding urbanism unfamiliar, intangible and dream-like. This all culminates with Kirsanoff's depictions of bodies of water as stirred and observed by the two sisters - a poetic image of the viscous, cerebral fluid that suffuses and suffocates the mise-en-scenes.