French Surrealist Cinema and Mulholland Drive

After watching a few french surrealists films that were screened last tuesday, I noticed some interesting similarities between those films and David Lynch's Mulholland Drive. The main plot of L'Age D'Or simply tells the story of two lovers trying to consumate their passion but constantly find themselves interrupted by several situations. The film itself is as surreal as they come, and through this I began to notice a correlation between it and Mulholland Drive. For one, the people in both films seem very disconnected from reality, which makes each film seem as if it is in fact part of a dream. For instance, in L'Age D'Or, outside the party a man kills a young boy for what seems like no reason. The party goers come out briefly to look at the scene, then reside to go back to the party and act as if a gruesome murder did not just take place. Yet later on, the main character slaps a female at the party, and the guests quickly jump to her aid and are furious with the man. This sense of a warped reality is present in Mulholland Drive and most of David Lynch's other works as well.

Ménilmontant

The film I most enjoyed from class last tuesday was Ménilmontant by far. This french impressionist film by director Dimitri Kirsanoff tells the story of two sisters who, after the murder of their parents when they were children, find themselves in Paris as young adults. As time pass, they both fall in love with the same thuggish man. One becomes pregnant by this man, while the other becomes a prostitute. Throughout the film, the jealousy evident between both sisters and their psychologoy is displayed by Kirsanoff in several ways.

Quite interesting to the audience is the first sexual encounter with the soon-to-be-pregnant sister and the thug. A moving camera sequence is superimposed over the scene, which depicts the other sister in her full jealous rage. The same sort of jealousy is felt through the first sister, when some time later the thug seduces the second. Instead of superimposing the two scenes, the director makes use of lightning-fast cuts back and forth to the second sister's shocked face, emphasizing this with every shot that gets closer and closer to her expression. These two different examples show how Kirsanoff was able to portray both sisters' emotions throughout the short film, which almost brings about the suicide of one. Even more astounding is the fact that this is one of the very few silent films that was able to tell a story without the use of intertitles, or any sort of writings that narrate the story.