Entering a café in Montmartre, and meeting Duchamp and Man Ray with Kiki while chatting with Picasso or Foujita, while Satie could not remember where he had left his inseparable umbrella; Cocteau the lonely “dandy”, and a couple of young Spanish men – the former was pudgy and taciturn, and the latter was dapper and disorientated (Buñuel and Dalì…)… In such a cafè one could make the most casual and different meetings; friendships for life were born and the most experimental collaborations could take shape. In the ‘20s and ‘30s Paris was a sort of natural magnet, a crossroads of positively transgressive energy which brought to extraordinary results through an exceptional transversal vitality which today is almost taken for grant in art, while at that time it was a sort of achievement which needed to be nourished every day. In this atmosphere people arrived, , some even from the former Soviet Union, not looking for fame or glory but all seeking the same thing: the wish to be able to express themselves freely and by using alternative ways, even through the new language of cinema. Right from the beginning, this form of expression desperately sought to be contaminated by other communication or creative expressive forms. This is just what is happening nowadays with video-art. This assumption may be simply verified through four excellent representatives: Deslaw, Kirsanoff and Eisenstein (whose first film, which will be shown on this occasion, is strongly linked to the concept of “transversal art” being part of a theatre performance), who in this case has chosen Aexandrov as his co-author.
Carlo Montanaro
Screenings schedule:
Brumes d’automne di Dimitri Kirsanoff
France, 1929, 15’, muto, b/n
La marche des machines di Eugene Deslaw
France, 1927, 9’, muto, b/n
Romance sentimentale di Grigori Aleksandrov – Sergej Ejzenstejn
France, 1930, 20’, sonoro, b/n
Dnevnik Glumova di Sergej Ejzenstejn
Russia, 1923, 5’, muto, b/n
