Entr'acte (1924, short) - Clair's creative experiment in movement

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A later made, pleasant poster for René Clair's Entr'acte

Here's a man, who is shooting a ball. A parrot sits on his hat. Then he jumps from a building. A camel attends his funeral procession along with a lot of men jumping.

Entr'acte is a famous short film by co-writer-director René Clair (The Grand Maneuver/Les Grandes Manoeuvres (1955)), which was created to function as an intermission [entr'acte] piece to be shown between the two acts of a production of the Relâche [canceled] ballet in Paris. Clair wrote it with fellow Dadaist artist Francis Picabia, who wrote the ballet. The film is an example of the Cinéma pur and absolute film movements of the time that occupied especially European filmmakers and French Dadaist artists. You can read more about these movements that scoffed at narratives and conventions in favor of movement and experiments here.
Entr'acte especially plays with slow-motion and super-impositions of up to four images at once. It is an amusing cinematic study in movement. Its interest for each viewer will depend a lot on one's own interest and patience for these sort of things.

Watch a 3-minute clip from the short here

Cost: Unknown
Box office: Unknown
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[Entr'acte was first shown in the US on December 4 and runs 22 minutes. It was shot in Paris with music by Eric Satie (The Royal Tennenbaums (2001), soundtrack). The short is available as an extra on the Criterion DVD release of Clair's feature À Nous la Liberté (1931). 2,613 IMDb-users have given Entr'acte an average 7.5/10 rating.]

What do you think of Entr'acte?

Man With a Movie Camera/Человек с киноаппаратом (1929) - Mechanical USSR fascination in technically astute experimental documentary

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A colorful original poster with English text over it for Dziga Vertov's Man With a Movie Camera

QUICK REVIEW:

Man With a Movie Camera is an experimental avant-garde silent B/W documentary of 68 minutes, a film without inter-titles, actors or a plot. Instead, it is an abstract work in cinema and a portrait of a Soviet city.

The film is a technical montage of fast-cut images and movement. It varies between depictions of sufferings in a modern metropolis, - perhaps an implicit criticism of the economical policies of the USSR? - with an intense fascination and excitement concerning everything new, (which rather annuls any inherent critique, I should think.) It was filmed in Odessa, Kharkiv and Kiev. Movie Camera features an endless display of Soviet industrial excellence and mechanical strength (through fire trucks, for instance.)
The film is made by Dziga Vertov (Kino Eye/Kinoglaz (1924)), born in Bialystok in what is Poland today but was part of the Russian empire then, and in his statement at the beginning of Movie Camera, he asserts that the film "is directed towards the creation of an authentically international absolute language of cinema – ABSOLUTE KINOGRAPHY – on the basis of its complete separation from the language of theater and literature."
The radical idealism behind Vertov's endeavor here comes off to me as more of a nationally-motivated show, and I think it was the same brand of extreme idealism that led the Soviet Union to some of its most detrimental and humanly disastrous policies. - Which is one reason that I am not full of groveling admiration for the film, (as many other film scholars seem to be.)

Watch the entire film with English subtitles (for the opening titles) here

Cost: Unknown
Box office: Unknown
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[The film had a difficult time upon release because of its radical structure and lack of formal content, but apart from this, I have not been able to ascertain whether or not it was a flop commercially. It took 3 years to make and bolsters a variety of advanced cinematic visual and editing techniques, which it remains notorious and respected for: The film was listed as the 8th best film ever by the 2012 critics' Sight & Sound poll and in 2014 was named best documentary ever (again by Sight & Sound). - Phew...!!]

What do you think of Man With a Movie Camera?
If you have insight into Dziga Vertov and/or any of his other films, please, enlighten us about him/them