Entr'acte is a veritable encyclopedia of the cinema of magic: the image plastic and kinetic, the sensibility comic, inventive, charming and absurd. Made as intermission entertainment for the Ballet Suédois, from an impromptu scenario by Francis Picabia and accompanied originally by an orchestral score by Erik Satie, the film stars a who's who of the Dada movement of Paris at the time. The plot, a series of improbable adventures, is inconsequential except as an excuse for Clair to explore the limits of the medium: the camera is run forward and in reverse, tipped side to side and upside down; the film is single-framed, undercranked, and run at high speed; the resulting action is animated, sped up, slowed down; the visuals are superimposed and transformed through various matte frames; the viewer is caught up and assaulted by the frenetic pace of the recorded and edited image. The sum of these parts is a charming but challenging vision of Paris as a world of the imagination and the Dadaist intellectual conceit.

 René Clair's Under the Roofs of Paris (buy new $26.99) is a delightful pastiche of vignettes loosely held together by a creaky plot involving theft, romance, and mistaken identity. Albert loves Pola, who is being romanced by a seedy thief. Albert ends up in jail instead of the thief and Pola falls for Albert's best friend, Louis. This film was Clair's first talkie and the first French musical. However, this isn't a musical in the Hollywood sense of the term. The characters do not break out in song every 10 minutes. Instead, we see action silently unfold to the pastoral orchestral music score. The film also features several imaginative tracking shots and an interesting glimpse into the post-World War I optimism that briefly reigned over Western Europe until the rise of National Socialism. --Kristian St. Clair

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