While preparing some notes to make sure I don’t make a total fool of myself when talking about Josef von Sterberg’s THE DEVIL IS A WOMAN, I caught– it’s a semi-annual thing– my usual bug for Dmitry Kirsanoff’s killing masterwork MENILMONTANT.
An eternal heartbreaker which lays the heart of every viewer on a smoking board, MENILMONTANT is an astonishing work of art, a completely original work made entirely outside of the French and Russian-emigre film communities as they stood at the time in Paris. Conceieved and photographed almost entirely by Kirsanoff himself, MENILMONTANT was the second film made by the young lad from Estonia, shot in and around the Parisian slum quarter of Menilmontant… and as an illustration of the superior value that an excess quantity of ambition, originality, depth of feeling, and youthful sense of immortality present versus access to large budgets, studio artifice, and vetted union crews, MENILMONTANT reigns supreme.
A beautiful example of the power of ambiguity, and the ability of narrative vagueries to pull the viewer deeper into– rather than evict from– the unfoldings, owing to the contribution of the viewer’s imagination to the narrative to flesh out the unspecified zones, thus personalizing the proceedings, MENILMONTANT has been claimed as a favorite by many a sophisticated cineaste, and the film tops Best Of lists today, as it has yesterday, and as it will continue to do on into the future.
Some films are so good that they nearly reject compliments from us mere mortals… certainly MENILMONTANT is up there in that lofty high castle. But as so little is known, to this day, about the film, and as I have gleaned some nuggets along the years of my fanatic love of this film that may not be so widely available to the devoted cineaste, I am formally choosing to risk embarassing myself by heaping praise upon the film and the person of Dmitry Kirsanoff. I merely pray it comes off, if only moderately successful, and on the lighter side of Embarassing.
Enjoy, and salud to MENILMONTANT.
***Link: EDIT: see new links above, created July 19th 2012
(SEE Usher FOR DL INSTRUCTIONS if you have trouble)
HerrSchreck's House of Commentary 
Am staying at a hotel at Ménilmontant tomorrow and Thursday!
Will be scouting for locations from the film.