zacknabo Entr'acte aka "In Between Acts" is a Dadaist, surrealist staple of early filmmaking. Garnering its name simply enough from being a short film made to show during the intermission of one of Eric Satie's surrealist ballets. This early avant-garde work does not rise to the level of Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali's Un Chien Andalou (1929) and L'Age d'Or (1930) or some of Man Ray's early stuff, but probably more entertaining than Ray. 92 years removed from this work and it is still an amazement to watch. The film begins with two foolish men jumping around a canon which is placed on top of a building overlooking Paris, appearing to argue which way to fire it or whether they should fire it at all. Finally, the cannon fires in slow motion effect directly toward the camera, one of the first of many Freudian phallic symbols in this 22 minute short. Next, there is the ballerina, mostly shot from below the glass she is elegantly dancing upon. These shots are also slowed. This our first psychoanalytic vaginal image (not as many as the phalli). The ballet sequences are some of the finest and inventive. The idea to have her dance on some sort of strong transparent material and have the camera below to make the appearance of the ballerina dancing on top of you is brilliant. Shooting up through transparent floor can be seen done masterfully 60 years later in Bela Tarr's Almanac of Fall. The dancing and the way in which it is filmed is majestic and ethereally and would be seen mastered a decade later by Nazi film propagandist and sports film innovator, Leni Riefenstahl, in Triumph of the Will and in the methods she used in filming Olympia, which was the 1938 Olympics. So why is this film still relevant? Because it has substantial influence in the history of cinema. Whatever your opinion may be the experimentation of early film is at the very least respectable and should be of interest. Entr'acte is an easily watchable early experimental film. The disorienting way in which Clair over-imposes images, specifically of building in the city to make it appear as if the world is at a tilt, upside down, or jutting separate ways all at once, is still fascinating today. The principles of those particular shots are the same camera tricks and editing techniques that can be seen today at major sporting events when before the game they impose images onto the basketball court and make it appear as if the floor is falling into some void or that the court is piece by piece falling apart while the logo at center court appears to rise and shift—it's the same principle, only 92 years ago and LeBron James isn't walking out afterwards for tip-off. Cinematic history should be studied, celebrated and truly appreciated for its bold inventiveness. All of this being said while in the final half of the film the narrative adventure begins. A man is killed and during the funeral procession his coffin, which is in the carriage mysteriously gets out of control and races through the city away from the mourners who have to chase it down in a wonderful comedic farce ala Keystone Cops. Finally the carriage gets outside the city and runs into an open field where the coffin slides out and bounces around the dirt. The mourners stand over the casket as magician pops out and methodically—with his wand—makes all of the mourners disappear. It is a Dadaist film. It could easily be read as a commentary on the absurdity of life and death. By allowing the coffin to get away and have the mourners turn to comedy, Clair effectively turns the idea of death on its head, illuminating the absurdity of death, as well as how often we encounter absurdity in life. And the ballerina keeps dancing and 92 years later she is still dancing, but only in between acts.

Steve Pulaski René Clair's "Entr'acte" is one of the pioneering films of the surrealist genre in cinema, which, from what I gather, is the attempt at bending reality and twisting all that we've come to know into something deeply strange but entirely mesmerizing. Heavy on its use of perverse or unique imagery and juxtaposition of images and sequences and frequently rejecting the conventions of linear, dramatic filmmaking, such surrealist filmmakers today, such as Quentin Dupieux and Terry Gilliam, focus on a wide-range or visual styles in addition to wacky, out-there humor that is sometimes funny because it doesn't make a bit of sense (otherwise known as "anti-humor").When it comes to "Entr'acte," however, we have an intriguing piece of film on our hands, one that serves as an early film of the "dadaism" movement in art, where European artists, writers, poets, filmmakers, and theorists began to reject commonly- utilized devices in art of the time in favor of a more radical approach to their mediums. These often included the injection of leftist policies and believes, most specifically anti-war policies that began hitting their stride as World War II neared.Just by watching the first few minutes of "Entr'acte," one can see that it has no desire at all to try and fit in with conventional artistic standards. It serves as a conglomerate of visuals from the dadaist period, many of which not making very much sense, but each provoking a genre-bending fascination amongst the audience. The opening scene itself is something to marvel at, showing two people firing a cannon from the top of a large building, while strangely-calming and infectious music is played in the background.The film persists on, with numerous different visuals that were likely never before seen outside of this particular work. What's remarkable is that despite the film's age, scenes involving characters running in slow motion and then being sped up into running in fast-motion after a vehicle still hold a certain kind of power to them. Overall, there's a mesmerizing quality "Entr'acte" bears that is surprising to note seeing as it perfectly defines a film that was "the first of its kind."Directed by: René Clair.

rozklad This short film was conceived (hence the title) by René Clair as a diversion for the interval of the absurdist-Dadaist ballet "Relâche", with screenplay by Francis Picabia and music by Erik Satie, both artists at the forefront of the contemporary Parisian avant-garde. At the supposed first night performance in 1924, expectant patrons were greeted by locked doors and a notice bearing the single word "Relâche", which is the French word for "No Show". How absurd! Oh what fun! To accompany the film, Satie composed a striking piece of orchestral music (arguably more significant than that for the ballet itself), and as expected the remastered film now has this added as its soundtrack, and a pretty good job has been made of editing the music to the action on the screen. This latter consists of a medley of surrealist sequences, culminating in a funeral procession, led by a camel, which escalates into a manic chase, intercut with footage from a big dipper. At the end, all the mourners disappear into thin air one by one; the corpse lives on. How significant all this is, as a narrative itself, as well as in the history of cinema as a whole, I am not qualified to comment, but it must have been seen as groundbreaking at the time, as well as good absurdist fun.At the start of the film is a short sequence of two men firing a cannon from the roof of the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées and jumping up and down, which was shown separately at the opening of the ballet, not as part of Entr'acte. The two men are Picabia and Satie themselves. This footage is especially poignant, as Satie himself was dead within a year.For Region 2 viewers, Entr'acte is included as a bonus with Clair's much later masterpiece "Les Grandes Manoeuvres".

Eumenides_0 Surrealism was officially born in 1924, with the publishing of André Breton's Surrealist Manifesto. So it's quite possibly that René Clair's short movie of the same year may be the first cinematic expression of surrealism, preceding Luis Buñuel's An Andaluzian Dog by a few years.Working with a screenplay by Francis Picabia, a Dada/surrealist artist, Clair's movie is much in line with Buñuel's future movie. At times it's a collage and juxtaposition of disconnected images; but it has a story in it, about a coffin that runs away from a procession, forcing a mob to chase it.It's an entertainment, but for me it's not a great work of cinema. It's not as good as Clair's next movie, The Imaginary Voyage, for instance. Perhaps it has value for scholars of film history, but I don't see it as a movie that has stood the test of time, like Fritz Lang's 1921 movie, Destiny, which seems fresh and engaging still.