Entr'acte

Heralded as a cinematic masterpiece, Rene Clair's extraordinary avant-garde film was originally created as an entr'acte, or intermission, between two acts of Francis Picabia's 1924 ballet, Relache, at the Theatre des Champs-Elysees in Paris. Taking Rene Clair's interest in Dadaism into account, the short film stages a surrealistic amalgamation of zany and unrelated scenes, pitting the revolutionary artist Marcel Duchamp against the American surrealist Man Ray in a game of chess with unforeseen consequences. And amid strange ballerinas, a loaded cannon, a mysterious funeral procession, rifle-range dummies, and a slow-paced camel, the elements of technology, mortality, life, and death define Rene Clair's shot-by-shot visual composition.