Experimental and avant-garde offering from director René Clair that was produced by the French dance company “Les Ballets Suis”, and features the members mourning the loss of their star dancer, Borlin. Outrageously surreal and silly, it offers such sights as a funeral procession with the hearse being pulled by a camel and the dead occupant giving a final performance. Eric Satie (who is uncredited) composed the music and makes an appearance towards the end. Clair’s work dating back to 1924 was greeted with as much hissing and booing as it was with applause; the Dadaist philosophy, based in part on offending its audience, was once again triumphantly realized. Through his film Clair invoked the entire catalogue of available cinematic techniques, abandoned the notion of narrative causality and in true Dadaist style, exposed the overthrow of the bourgeois norm. The audience was assulted with a series of non-related and often provocative images -from a “legless” man rising from his weapon and running away at full tilt, to a ballerina transformed into a bearden man-within a work which stressed the pleasure of inventing new spatial and temporal relations while provoking random laughter. While Clair often referred to this film as “visual babblings”, audiences of today can see the film as a serious attempt to subvert traditional values, both cinematic and social. Clair’s film led the way to the creation of a visual language still inspiring various filmmakers with the revolutionary editing and insurmountable bitterness of its attitude. The film which might be considered as the expression of the most immediate and the subtlest effects of a cinematic language leaves its mark on almost each production of Clair. It is saluted as a classic for its attempt to question the established moral criteria as well.
