Laughter and nonsense, ‘Takt’ and ‘Rhythmus’: “Entr’acte” by René Clair

Abstract

Conceived as an interlude between the two acts of Relâche, Francis Picabia’s renowned instantaneist ballet, set to music by Erik Satie and choreographed by Jean Börlin, Entr’acte is considered a manifesto of Dadaist cinema, in which the image, “freed from its duty to signify, is finally liberated” (R. Clair). It is a divertissement generating comedy by flirting on the one hand with the Dadaist alphabet – made up of the absurd, the irrational, the grotesque and the random – and on the other with the playful stylistic elements of pre-war slapstick, a fetish of the avant-garde. But it is also a dreamlike tale of the metropolis which, like the urban symphonies of the time, “catches in the act” the most modern of objects (the city) with the whole range of techno-linguistic possibilities of cinema explored in those years by the avant-garde. Here, against the frenetic rhythm of the mechanised and intermittent experience of modern life (Klages’ Takt), Rhytmus resists as the deviation from mechanical repetition, the primordial, organic, and irregular flow. It bursts energetically into the film like the circular dance of a ballerina, the anarchy of a jet of water, or a hypnotic group run filmed in slow motion, ironically playing with the empathy at the centre of the theoretical debate of the time.