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A Brilliant Conflict

It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

Licking his wounds after the catastrophic failure of his 1926 version of 'Zola' starring his then-wife (1920-30) Catherine Hessling, Jean Renoir cheered himself up by making the nearest he ever came to science fiction with this exuberant romp set in the year 2028 displaying the impressively athletic dancing ability and lack of inhibition of the baby-faced Ms Hessling.Arriving in the shattered remnants of Paris in a spherical spaceship that resembles 'Rover' from 'The Prisoner', a smartly dressed visitor from the African continent - where civilisation now resides since Europe blew itself to smithereens - is confronted by a scantily clad savage played by Ms Hessling; and joins her in an energetic dancing duel facilitated by some pretty far-out trick photography. (Renoir anticipates Kubrick by forty years by going into negative to depict his flight.) If this had ever been intended for public exhibition it would have been a supreme example of pre-code filmmaking. Great fun.

"Charleston Parade" is a 1926 silent, short film by director Jean Renoir. Set in the year 2028, the film sees a pilot in blackface and minstrel attire leaving a futuristic, high-tech Africa and flying to a primitive, post-apocalyptic France.When our pilot lands, he meets an attractive, scantily clad woman. She's a carnal creature who throws her body at the unsuspecting pilot, who in turn shyly rejects her advances. The woman then begins to communicate with the pilot using dance, scenes which anticipate Renoir's own "French Cancan" (1954).Though dismissed as a silly film, "Charleston Parade" abounds with interesting reversals. Renoir flips white and black stereotypes by assigning frenzied, tribal movements to whites (and a pet monkey no less) and dandyish behaviour (and sexual timidness) to the pilot. The pilot is himself played by Johnny Huggins, a black man, yet one who wears blackface paint, reversing the racist implications of minstrel shows. The film then ends with the pilot taking the primitive white girl back to Africa, where she will reintroduce white aboriginal dance to a people who have lost their own art-form by dint of distance from their ancestors. But while the film parodies white/black historical relations, it also points to common bonds. For Renoir, dance rather than film constitutes a shared language and perhaps also the chief art form from which cinema sprang.Incidentally, the 1920s saw the birth of new African-American communities in Paris. After WW1 ended, many African American GIs decided to stay in France, which lacked the widespread racism of the United States. It was also around this time that jazz was introduced to the French, as well as other aspects of black culture. Pretty soon African American musicians, artists and Harlem Renaissance writers began flocking to Paris – the city's Luminous Years – an exodus which WW2 promptly stopped.9/10 - Even minor Renoir is good Renoir.

Shot in three days on a practically zero budget, using film stock left over from Nana, Jean Renoir made this strange curio just for fun. He never edited it. It was never released. He later gave the footage to the Cinémathèque Française, who pieced the film together.The story: it's the year 2028. An explorer from Central Africa (Johnny Huggins, a jazz dancer of the 1920s, who appears here in minstrel makeup; he actually was black) arrives in a post-apocalyptic Paris in a flying sphere. He encounters a scantily-clad wild girl and her monkey friend. The girl dances the Charleston to try to seduce him. He thinks she's threatening him and he runs away. She chases after him, dancing ever more aggressively and seductively. The explorer begins to watch, hesitantly, but curiously. The girl draws a telephone on the wall, which turns into a real telephone, and she calls some kind of disembodied human head with wings. Some other winged disembodied heads appear. The girl hands the phone to the explorer, and one of the heads speaks to him--apparently letting him know that the girl's OK. Then the explorer and the girl dance the Charleston together. The girl leaves with the explorer in his flying sphere, her tearful monkey friend waving goodbye.

A man in blackface lands in a spaceship and meets a girl who lives in some sort of shack with a monkey. He hooks her up with a telephone, and she teaches him how to Charleston. Then they fly off in the spaceship, leaving the monkey behind. Cringe-inducing blackface aside, this short film makes no sense. I think that's the plot, but I'm not sure by a long shot. You can't tell that this is Renoir at work, despite his characteristic humanism. Good use of slow-motion, though. Can be found on the NY Film Annex's series of Experimental Film videos, No. 18, I believe.