L'Etoile de Mer (1928)

"Nous sommes a jamais perdus dans le désert de léternèbre."

This is an interesting little comparison to Un Chien Andalou, directed a year earlier by Man Ray. The version I saw had a superb soundtrack by Paul Mercer which I recommend hugely.

The other film used conventional film-making tropes and techniques to depict surreal scenes, divorced from any context or sense of cause and effect, and that made it seem rather slippery to me. I found it hard to grab on to anything so I could talk about the film. That isn't the case here, with the use of soft focus. The blurring of the picture throughout the film is as much a part of the narrative as the events depicted, which I suppose can be understood in terms of the modernist foregrounding of form as opposed to content. As a piece of art this is far more a modernist work than a surrealist one. Interestingly, though, the picture often has a kind of Impressionist quality.

While there isn't any obvious plot here, there is a definite theme of beauty, which is interesting precisely because by 1928 it was a very old-fashioned conception of what art was supposed to be or do. We are tantalised with the beauty of the woman, with the first shot of her face which is in focus showing her peeping, face half-hidden, over a newspaper. Only at the end of the film are we male voyeurs finally rewarded.

The scenes of pieces of newspapers blowing across a beach remind me of the scene from American Beauty where a plastic bag, floating in the wind, is said to be beautiful. I couldn't say what their significance was, though. And as for the starfish I have no idea. But this is a fascinating film.