Kirsanoff’s Ménilmontant remains one of the most celebrated and moving of French avant-garde impressionist films of the 1920s. It is still frequently screened in museums, art-house cinemas, and festivals around the world, and its growing circle of admirers has included mainstream American critic Pauline Kael, who called it “an exquisite, poetic 40-minute movie that is one of the least-known masterpieces of the screen.” A harbinger of the poetic-realist French cinema of the 30s, it also announced the city symphonies (Ruttmann’s Berlin; Sauvage’s Études sur Paris). In his 1957 obituary of the director, Walter S. Michel wrote in Film Culture: “Dimitri Kirsanoff was a poet who chose the cinema as his medium of expression and gave us Ménilmontant, Brumes d’automne and Rapt, three of the most beautiful and intelligent films in the history of the cinema.” Dudley Andrew hailed it as “a personal triumph of art over industry.” “Industry,” however, was quick to exact its revenge, as Kirsanoff’s career became one of the most blighted in cinema history. Deprived of true creative freedom in the early sound period, he was reduced to soul-crushing hack work, apart from Rapt.
Even in his heyday, Kirsanoff gave few interviews and was guarded about his origins and formative years. (He did not hide his film tastes: he trashed Eisenstein’s Potemkin as cheaply manipulative, praised the humanism of Pudovkin, and worshipped Von Stroheim.) Thanks to the research of Dirk Hoyer, a German filmmaker and lecturer at Tallinn University’s Baltic Film, Media, Arts and Communications School, we now have more exact information on his background: neither Slav nor White Russian, and even less so a member of the Russian aristocracy, he was born Markus David Kaplan in Tartu, Estonia, in 1899, into a Lithuanian Jewish family who had come to Estonia in the 1870s; his father was murdered by the Bolsheviks in 1919. Emigrating to France the following year, he adopted the name Dimitri Kirsanoff, in homage to a character in Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons. He studied music under Pablo Casals at the newly founded École Normale de Musique and played the cello in the orchestras of various Paris cinemas (his exact contemporary and fellow cinéaste maudit, Jean Grémillon, was accompanying films on the violin).
Kirsanoff soon found a muse and helpmate in Geneviève Lebas, a diminutive blue-eyed Breton who had come to Paris intent on breaking into the movies. Following Kirsanoff’s example, she adopted a Russian name, Nadia Sibirskaia. Together these two false Russians embarked on a collaboration that would leave a brief but indelible mark on French independent cinema.
Kirsanoff’s first film in 1921, self-financed, was L’Ironie du destin, a two-hander about two aged outcasts who meet on a park bench and evoke their failed lives, only to realize they have known one another in earlier times. Kirsanoff and Sibirskaia played the leads, and the film was shot mostly in natural locations. Despite its technical deficiencies, it found favor with more enlightened film journalists (notably Léon Moussinac, who championed it in the pages of L’Humanité), and Sibirskaia was singled out for her portrayal of a woman from adolescence to old age. Now considered lost, L’Ironie du destin was also the first French film without intertitles. Kirsanoff struggled to find commercial distribution, and it had only the briefest of releases.
Encouraged nonetheless by his first real contact with the filmmaking process, Kirsanoff began Ménilmontant (originally entitled Les Cent pas) during the winter of 1924-25, with Sibirskaia again in the lead. The lurid story, which runs a mere 40 minutes and contains no intertitles, concerns two orphaned sisters who move to Paris and are preyed upon by a young Lothario who leaves one of them with a child and drives the other to prostitution.
Kirsanoff appropriated a palette of avant-garde techniques to tell a story that progresses with haunting elliptical momentum. “There are sequences of violence in rapid montage, of dreamlike multiple superimpositions and lap dissolves (all done in camera), of documentarylike impressions…, of classical continuity editing…” (Richard Abel, French Cinema: The First Wave, 1915-1929). Though Kirsanoff had the collaboration of an elderly, extraordinary professional cameraman, he claimed to have done the hand-held camerawork himself.
Influential critic Jean Tedesco selected Ménilmontant to open the second season of his repertory cinema at the Théâtre du Vieux Colombier in Feb. 1926 (on a double bill with Chaplin’s The Pilgrim). It was an immediate success, and was brought back regularly by popular demand. The film was a personal triumph for Sibirskaia, whose heartbreaking performance as the seduced-and-abandoned younger sister had critics comparing her to Gish and Nazimova (there is a touch of Griffith to the scenes between the two sisters). The scene on the park bench, in which a vagabond shares a hard-earned piece of bread with the starving young mother, is one of the most wrenching scenes of pathos in silent cinema.
Unfortunately, a local commercial distributor, thinking to make a box-office killing, reissued the film in early 1928, “improving” it with the addition of numerous intertitles commissioned from a professional playwright. Cinémagazine protested: “Some may have been necessary, but they’ve added much too many, and any old how.”
Success, however, did not become Kirsanoff. His next two films, Destin and Sables, compromised by commercial demands, failed to repeat the miracle of Ménilmontant, and his haunting short mood piece, Brumes d’automne (1928), was lost in the rush of the talkies. Kirsanoff found work at the failing Paramount studios outside Paris, but clashed with studio bosses over what were considered his avant-garde tics and was removed from a film, which was re-shot by another director. His last bid for acceptance, Rapt (1934), an ambitious adaptation of a Swiss literary classic by Ramuz, was a resounding commercial failure. He died in 1957, totally forgotten.
Lenny Borger