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182 III. COMPOSITION
AVANT-GARDE TRENDS
What kind of experimental film did grow out of intentions such as these? Some are highly individual productions. Alexandrov's Romance sentimentale, for instance, defies classification by being a crude mixture, or rather, inventory, of all imaginable avant-garde innovations and aspirations. Nor would it be easy to pigeonhole, say, Hans Richter's Ghosts Before Breakfast, in which he employs trick after trick to picture the shenanigans of hats and dishes in full rebellion against their everyday chores. And of course, Entr'acte by Rene Clair holds a place of its own.
Entr'acte
This ''classic of absurdity"14 deserves special comment as the only non-story, nondocumentary avant-garde experiment which suggests a definite attachment to camera-reality. Entr'acte can roughly be divided into two parts, the first of which features not so much rhythmical movement as the content of a dream (supposedly dreamt by a person who visited a fair the evening before) . The dream images— among them a fragile paper boat floating through the sky above a Paris roof landscape— are loosely connected in the manner of free associations, drawing on analogies, contrasts, or no recognizable principle at all. Cigarettes standing on end become the columns of a Greek temple; the skirt of a dancing ballerina turns into an opening flower; and when the camera tilts up from her skirt to show us the rest of the ballerina we see instead of her head that of a bearded male. It is like a performance of Melies's magician. Incidentally, the resemblance to Melies is reinforced by the fact that some scenes are unashamedly stagy. The salient point is that all this is not meant to carry a message. The transformation of the cigarettes into Greek columns is nothing but a toying with remote similarities; the imaginary body composed of the ballerina's lower half and the bearded head is an outright Dadaist effrontery. In short, fantasy is treated playfully and, hence, confirms rather than obstructs the spirit of the medium.*
There is internal evidence to the effect that Clair did not think of placing fantasy above camera-reality; that his playfulness in handling the dream images sprang from his loyalty to the cinematic approach. Consider the second part of the film which, unlike the first, features rhythm. In it the dream continues in a sense; but from a delicate fabric of incoherent contents it changes into a straight burlesque centering, Dada fashion,
* Cf. pp. 86-7.