Charleston Parade (1927)

Yawn. Poorly Filmed Snooze Fest.

Best movie of this year hands down!

The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

Decidedly, we haven't heard anything yet from Renoir, as Sur un Air de Charleston is a silent short film. There is surrealist dream logic in the drawing of the phone which then becomes real, as well as Dadaist elements like the slipping on the waxed ground. It is another effort by Renoir to play around with the medium... but perhaps something else is at the heart of the matter. The film hails jazz culture as being timeless and universal underscored by flipping colonialist stereotypes on their head (the white cannibal, the black space explorer/time traveler). There is a theme of savagery that runs through the film that I consider to be extremely tongue-in-cheek. I conjecture that the film was an homage to the Jazz Singer in many ways - perhaps not that particular film text per se, but more generally the hype that would have existed in the industry at the time about the shift to sound and the potential of films like the Jazz Singer to accomplish the feat. It is difficult to deny that Sur un Air de Charleston requires sound for the pleasure of spectators at the time (ironically there were none), but equally undeniable that the sound should come from a synchronized soundtrack. I simply feel this way because of the manipulation of the dancing through editing where Renoir presents the dance in three or more temporal states. It feels to me that Renoir was imagining sound techniques prior to their industrial application. Why not release the film at the time then? My two answers are that Renoir would have been unsatisfied with the anachronistic homage (the film was silent) and that he may not have sought to offend many of his filmmaker colleagues who would soon be reeling against the introduction of sound film.

As a closet completist I felt I must see this one, even though what I knew about it wasn't prepossessing. And the result: a piece of exuberant tosh by Renoir - the classics were definitely a long way off.In 2028 black-faced Negro flies in to Terra Incognito - post War France - in a sphere and is ensnared by an indefatigable dancing scantily clad white aborigine woman. Although he too has a sense of rhythm he's especially impressed by her either dancing first in slow- and then fast-mo. Slinky and shameless dance moves, a telephone drawn on the wall and 5 bodiless grinning angels are highlights - give me Tex Avery anyday! Hessling was certainly good to look at (personally speaking of course) but even though it's so short it still drags without a coherent plot.But! This wasn't meant to be heavy, and as knockabout sci-fi it was an interesting 19 minutes - I might even watch it again sometime.

That's pretty much all that needs to be said about this bizarre exercise in reverse-colonialism, as an explorer (in blackface with very prominent white lips!) lands in his globular airship from Africa in the desolate "terra incognita" of France, 2028. There he espies a gorgeous native savage (Ms. Hessling) who treats him to an example of and a lesson in the Charleston, the "native dance of white people" or something such.Ms. Hessling is very sexy, the film is pretty erotic by 20s standards, there are some interesting special effects, but it's a silly trifle at best, and of course the blackface is....not something we want to remember from Jean Renoir. Nice print on the Lionsgate "early Renoir" 3-disc DVD set.

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.