The Well-Furnished Interior of the Masses: Kirsanoff's "Menilmontant" and the Streets of Paris

Abstract

Film historians and critics have cited Dmitri Kirsanoff's Menilmontant (1925) in brief but often contradictory terms that raise more questions than they answer. Most critics regard the film as a typical example of the French avant-garde cinema of the 1920s, if only for Kirsanoff's bravura editing techniques, which, in the eyes of one film historian at least, anticipate the montage aesthetics of the Soviet cinema.1 Critics also make note of the film's narrative, which could be best described as a truncated melodrama: on the one hand, it tells the story of love found and lost, with the film's two heroines losing their innocence to Paris's corrupt attractions; on the other hand, brutal, repetitive violence lurks in the background of the love story, disrupting it at unexpected intervals. Motivations are often elided, focalizations are abruptly switched for no apparent reason, and crucial events are left out altogether. The elliptical quality of the narrative sometimes seems to be a product of Kirsanoff's defamiliarizing editing techniques, while at other times the disjointed story seems to prompt elliptical editing. The narrative appears so incoherent that one critic has referred to the film as if it did not have a narrative at all.2