Audience Member
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 Fukushim and Ignacio Rivas Bixio.
Rated 4/5 Stars •
Rated 4 out of 5 stars
02/06/23
Full Review
Audience Member
Often described very accurately as "a perfect fusion between French Impressionism, avant-garde Surrealism, Soviet montage and Hollywood pathos", Dimitri Kirsanoff's <i>Ménilmontant</i> (1926) represents the extent to which silent cinema could reach as a means of dramatic storytelling.
With revolutionary editing techniques that preceded many future projects, such as the double exposure, <i>Ménilmontant</i> is primarily notorious for having no intertitles explaining the story. It is storytelling at its most theatrical. An image is worth more than a thousand words. In this way, Kirsanoff's immaculate vision allowed the film to wear several masks in order to convey different emotions. From the opening sequence, which has a brutally impactful effect with no hesitation, to the scenarios that transmitted loneliness and melancholy, <i>Ménilmontant</i> is versatile in its appearance even if uneven in its genre composition, the latter not being a negative aspect whatsoever.
This versatility, however, is not only emotional, but technical as well. It makes visual transitions, from image juxtapositions to an extraordinary cinematography rarely seen before that precedes Renoir's <i>Partie de Campagne</i> by 10 years, gracious to capture the facets of an entire world: the natural landscapes of the country and the populated streets of the city, the images of terror and the explicit facial expressions, always transmitting something and never letting go.
"Revolutionary" is a term that seldom applies. This is a case that earned that merit. <i>Ménilmontant</i> blossoms as a flower in a sunny morning and sleeps quietly during the night, finding a perpetual place in the annals of cinema, in the mind of the critic and in the heart of the appreciator.
100/100
Rated 5/5 Stars •
Rated 5 out of 5 stars
01/22/23
Full Review
eric b
This 38-minute short isn't much as a story -- just a sketchy melodrama about two pretty sisters whose lives go astray after a pale, thin creep seduces them both. But never mind the plot -- this is another of those innovative Russian silents where the virtuoso, rapid-fire editing is enough of a lure on its own. There are no title cards, but you won't miss them. What I did miss was an effective score -- the version I saw had a contemporary, avant-jazz soundtrack that clashed with the images more than complementing them.
Rated 3.5/5 Stars •
Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars
03/31/23
Full Review
Audience Member
Silent film that uses non-standard editing (especially for its time) to evoke a state of melancholy and dread through most of its events, from its violent bookends to the center passage where a young woman is seduced by a cad.
Rated 5/5 Stars •
Rated 5 out of 5 stars
02/20/23
Full Review
Audience Member
WEB. La historia es deliberadamente simple y consecuente, pero el genial tratamiento cinematográfico (sin texto alguno) y la extraordinaria presencia de Nadia Sibirskaia elevan esto a un nivel muy alto. / The story is deliberately simple and consequential, but the genial cinematographic treatment and the extraordinary presence of Nadia Sibirskaia elevate this to a very high place.
Rated 3.5/5 Stars •
Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars
02/21/23
Full Review
Audience Member
that s what an ideal film is: images without a word (voice, or even intertitle), but only visual language. EXCITING!
Rated 4/5 Stars •
Rated 4 out of 5 stars
01/30/23
Full Review
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