Sur un air de Charleston (1927) User Reviews

CHARLESTON PARADE (Jean Renoir, 1927) **1/2

[Bunuel1976 · 6/10 · 7 June 2007]

This is, by far, Jean Renoir's oddest film: a surreal, sci-fi/musical short which was originally accompanied by a specially-composed score but whose print on the DVD itself, bafflingly, features no underscoring whatsoever. Incongruously enough, the film apparently grew out of Renoir's desire to utilize footage left over from NANA (1926)!

Again, we find Renoir's wife at the time – Catherine Hessling – in a major role; here, she is a sexy dancer from the future who teaches a sophisticated negro explorer(!) the Charleston dance (at which he eventually proves himself remarkably adept). It is very hard to believe now that Hessling's dancing caused quite a stir at the time but there you go. Unfortunately, the film doesn't add up to much and there's practically nothing of the traditional Renoir on display. Besides, its premise isn't enough to sustain even the film's two-reel length, with the protracted dance sequence itself, filmed at a variety of speeds, emerging as a hollow exercise in style.

For what it's worth, other characters appearing in the film include a (fake-looking) monkey who is Hessling's sole companion on the seemingly deserted place the coloured astronaut lands on and, for no apparent reason, a group of grinning angels (among them Renoir himself)! The film's best gag is one that would soon become a staple of animation: at one point, Hessling draws a telephone on a wall and this immediately materializes into the real thing.

A Private Divertimento

[FerdinandVonGalitzien · 6/10 · 16 February 2007]

"Sur Un Air De Charleston" is a good example of the evil influences that came from beyond the Atlantic sea… strange customs, garments, gastronomy or dances; modernises that almost put an end the conservatives European habits.

A reputable French director (a frenchified dichotomy… ) instead of listening day and night to "La Marseilleise", changed such martial and delicate music rhythm to Jazz, that out-of-tune Amerikan music that was fashionable during the mad 20's in Europe (with the exception of the aristocratic circles that preferred dancing in circles in to dizzy waltzes). So, due to Renoir's liking of Jazz and with some left over stock footage of his excellent and previous film "Nana" (1926), he decided to have a good time making this surreal, bizarre but funny musical silent film (a frenchified incongruity).

In 2028, a mysterious African explorer puts his aircraft on Terra incognita. He meets a charming young native that is accompanied by a chimpanzee, who is going to introduce him to a dance of the wild natives (not the chimpanzee)…, that is to say, the Charleston.

That's the bizarre story of the film, a perfect excuse to put and show the French (Dame Catherine Hessling, natürlich! ) dancing the Charleston wildly… forward, backward in fast and stop motion. Meanwhile the astonished African explorer (Herr Johnny Huggings, a black actor characterized as a negro!) learns to dance quickly and hastily.

Obviously "Sur Un Air De Charleston" is a harmless, a private divertimento, a bizarre but charming short film made to show Renoir's wife's dancing talent. It is an oeuvre that includes the atmosphere that Herr Renoir was so fond of in some of his early films besides … all that Jazz.

And now, if you'll allow me, I must temporarily take my leave because this German Count must dance St. Vitus's dance.

The Culture of the White Aborigines

[JoeytheBrit · 5/10 · 15 February 2010]

This is an odd one and no mistake. In 2028, a black man (in black face and minstrel costume) pilots an orb to a savage land that once was Paris. There, he finds a native girl – a scantily-clad Catherine Hessling (Mrs Renoir) – who ties him to a post before dancing the Charleston. That's about all the story there is really. At one point, the girl draws a telephone which becomes real and uses it to a phone a group of bodiless angels (her hubby amongst them).

Although the plot-free film quickly becomes rather tiresome because of its protracted dance sequences, it looks quite fascinating. Renoir repeatedly slows the motion while Hessling dances to turn what is essentially a frenetic jig into something altogether more sensuous, and the picture of a black-faced, top-hatted man dancing on a sunny, ruined street is one of those peculiar images that will forever be etched in my mind (even though I'll probably be asking if anyone knows which film it's from on the 'I Need to Know' board in a couple of years).

The version I watched was completely silent, with no musical score at all. Some kind of music would have helped things along a bit, but I guess it would have been difficult to accompany all those slow-motion sequences effectively. Definitely worth a look for its curiosity value, but not really a film of much substance.

The African and the Parisian

[tieman64 · 7 March 2014]

"Charleston Parade" is a 1926 silent, short film by director Jean Renoir. Set in the year 2028, the film sees a pilot in blackface and minstrel attire leaving a futuristic, high-tech Africa and flying to a primitive, post-apocalyptic France.

When our pilot lands, he meets an attractive, scantily clad woman. She's a carnal creature who throws her body at the unsuspecting pilot, who in turn shyly rejects her advances. The woman then begins to communicate with the pilot using dance, scenes which anticipate Renoir's own "French Cancan" (1954).

Though dismissed as a silly film, "Charleston Parade" abounds with interesting reversals. Renoir flips white and black stereotypes by assigning frenzied, tribal movements to whites (and a pet monkey no less) and dandyish behaviour (and sexual timidness) to the pilot. The pilot is himself played by Johnny Huggins, a black man, yet one who wears blackface paint, reversing the racist implications of minstrel shows. The film then ends with the pilot taking the primitive white girl back to Africa, where she will reintroduce white aboriginal dance to a people who have lost their own art-form by dint of distance from their ancestors. But while the film parodies white/black historical relations, it also points to common bonds. For Renoir, dance rather than film constitutes a shared language and perhaps also the chief art form from which cinema sprang.

Incidentally, the 1920s saw the birth of new African-American communities in Paris. After WW1 ended, many African American GIs decided to stay in France, which lacked the widespread racism of the United States. It was also around this time that jazz was introduced to the French, as well as other aspects of black culture. Pretty soon African American musicians, artists and Harlem Renaissance writers began flocking to Paris – the city's Luminous Years – an exodus which WW2 promptly stopped.

9/10 - Even minor Renoir is good Renoir.

Gotta dance

[Spondonman · 7/10 · 2 October 2007]

As a closet completist I felt I must see this one, even though what I knew about it wasn't prepossessing. And the result: a piece of exuberant tosh by Renoir - the classics were definitely a long way off.

In 2028 black-faced Negro flies in to Terra Incognito - post War France - in a sphere and is ensnared by an indefatigable dancing scantily clad white aborigine woman. Although he too has a sense of rhythm he's especially impressed by her either dancing first in slow- and then fast-mo. Slinky and shameless dance moves, a telephone drawn on the wall and 5 bodiless grinning angels are highlights - give me Tex Avery anyday! Hessling was certainly good to look at (personally speaking of course) but even though it's so short it still drags without a coherent plot.

But! This wasn't meant to be heavy, and as knockabout sci-fi it was an interesting 19 minutes - I might even watch it again sometime.

Truly bizarre early Renoir

[edwartell · 4/10 · 30 December 2000]

A man in blackface lands in a spaceship and meets a girl who lives in some sort of shack with a monkey. He hooks her up with a telephone, and she teaches him how to Charleston. Then they fly off in the spaceship, leaving the monkey behind. Cringe-inducing blackface aside, this short film makes no sense. I think that's the plot, but I'm not sure by a long shot. You can't tell that this is Renoir at work, despite his characteristic humanism. Good use of slow-motion, though. Can be found on the NY Film Annex's series of Experimental Film videos, No. 18, I believe.

Catherine Hessling is sexy, the film is silly

[OldAle1 · 5/10 · 20 September 2007]

That's pretty much all that needs to be said about this bizarre exercise in reverse-colonialism, as an explorer (in blackface with very prominent white lips!) lands in his globular airship from Africa in the desolate "terra incognita" of France, 2028. There he espies a gorgeous native savage (Ms. Hessling) who treats him to an example of and a lesson in the Charleston, the "native dance of white people" or something such.

Ms. Hessling is very sexy, the film is pretty erotic by 20s standards, there are some interesting special effects, but it's a silly trifle at best, and of course the blackface is....not something we want to remember from Jean Renoir. Nice print on the Lionsgate "early Renoir" 3-disc DVD set.

Extremely bizarre

[Horst_In_Translation · 4/10 · 22 April 2016]

"Sur un air de Charleston" is a French black-and-white silent film from almost 90 years ago. The man behind the camera here was the then pretty young Jean Renoir. The story is about a young white woman (Hessling appeared in several Renoir films) who teaches dancing to a distinguished Black gentleman, makeup work not so great, it was very obvious he was played by a White guy. It is also Hudgins' only credit. Well.. the story sounds enough for a 3-minute film, but actually, it went over 20 minutes, at least the version I saw. I cannot say it was a really interesting watch. if there is any reason to check it out, it is if you are a Renoir completionist or if you just really love bizarre early films. The parts with the guy in costume were the weirdest thing ever. I do not recommend "Charleston". Story was truly strange and yet not memorable or easy to understand. Not recommended.

Just for Fun

[plaidpotato · 9/10 · 2 August 2004]

Shot in three days on a practically zero budget, using film stock left over from Nana, Jean Renoir made this strange curio just for fun. He never edited it. It was never released. He later gave the footage to the Cinémathèque Française, who pieced the film together.

The story: it's the year 2028. An explorer from Central Africa (Johnny Huggins, a jazz dancer of the 1920s, who appears here in minstrel makeup; he actually was black) arrives in a post-apocalyptic Paris in a flying sphere. He encounters a scantily-clad wild girl and her monkey friend. The girl dances the Charleston to try to seduce him. He thinks she's threatening him and he runs away. She chases after him, dancing ever more aggressively and seductively. The explorer begins to watch, hesitantly, but curiously. The girl draws a telephone on the wall, which turns into a real telephone, and she calls some kind of disembodied human head with wings. Some other winged disembodied heads appear. The girl hands the phone to the explorer, and one of the heads speaks to him--apparently letting him know that the girl's OK. Then the explorer and the girl dance the Charleston together. The girl leaves with the explorer in his flying sphere, her tearful monkey friend waving goodbye.

"That is how White aborigines culture became fashionable in Africa"

[ackstasis · 4/10 · 27 September 2008]

I enjoy science-fiction just as much as the next man… but what the hell was that? Apparently shot over just three days using excess film stock left over from his previous film, 'Nana (1926),' this Jean Renoir short is a bewildering futuristic satire, produced on a budget that couldn't have been much more than zero. In the year 2028, following a great war, Africa has become the most civilised region on Earth, and what was formerly Europe has been designated "Terres Inconnues (Unknown Land)." An African explorer – played by Johnny Huggins, a Black man dressed up as a White man dressed up as a Black man, if you follow me – travels to the ruins of Paris in his spherical aircraft, and lands outside the lair of a Parisian savage (Catherine Hessling, then the director's wife) and her primate companion, perhaps the creepiest ape-man costume I've ever seen. The savage, as part of some bizarre sexual initiation ritual, starts showing the explorer the Charleston dance, which he is delighted to learn himself.

It doesn't help the film that Hessling, who was wonderful the following year in Renoir's 'The Little Match Girl (1928),' isn't much of a dancer, though the extensive use of slow-motion adds a touch of surrealism to the ceremony. Furthermore, I'm quite shocked that Renoir would exploit his own wife as such a blatant sexual object – it doesn't come as a surprise to learn of their divorce just three years later! On the plus side, I did like the general sci-fi concept behind the film, and the slyly satiric touch of the reversing the racial roles usually typical in such stories as this. However, why Renoir decided to dress up his Black actor as a minstrel will remain a mystery for all of time. Silly, crude and quite pointless, 'Charleston Parade (1927)' is a cinematic oddity from one of cinema's most respected directors, and is perhaps an effort that he would have liked to forget. The DVD version came without a musical soundtrack, but I compromised with a selection of pieces from Dmitri Shostakovich.

Excellent

[Adrian Sweeney · 8/10 · 13 March 2009]

I just found this as an extra on a DVD of 'Grand Illusion.' A surreal, silent, sci-fi short from 1927, it is the tale of a 21st-century African airman who journeys to post-apocalyptic Paris and discovers the sacred dance of the ancients, the Charleston. Hilarious, delightful, sexy, and utterly, utterly, soul-refreshingly bonkers, the maddest thing I have seen in ages.

Now I am told my comment is not long enough, which is absurd. There is nothing more to add, except watch out for the Angel-heads. Also, lazy advertising men who are tempted to rip off the angel-heads for some moronic commercial should be informed that someone already did so years ago. I believe that is my ten lines now.

Seems like a trope a minute

[heliotropetwo · 9/10 · 30 May 2007]

A hundred years from then, a sphere meanders through the air from a civilized Africa to a wrecked Paris. A goofy sphere. A music hall black face stereotype emerges, encounters a savage Parisian who has a mysterious relationship with an ape and would have flunked the Code test (how could Renoir have so shamelessly exploited his wife?). She dances the Charleston for him and he recognizes it as his ancestral dance. He learns it from her.

So, what have we here? A satire on contemporary French sophisticates, more primitive than those from whose cultures they have fashioned their entertainments. A joke, made using the remainder of the Nana film stock. Pure fun if you can get past the stereotype. Oh, and the Angels are a rogues' gallery of French film history. My advice is to see it even if you think it will disgust you. Hessling is unbelievably hot. And the gang is really mocking its own rather brutally.

Jean Renoir's Only Sci-Fi Movie

[richardchatten · 8/10 · 10 June 2017]

Licking his wounds after the catastrophic failure of his 1926 version of 'Nana', starring his then-wife (1920-30) Catherine Hessling, Jean Renoir cheered himself up by making the nearest he ever came to science fiction with this exuberant romp set in the year 2028 displaying the impressively athletic dancing ability and lack of inhibition of the baby-faced Ms Hessling.

Arriving in the shattered remnants of Paris in a spherical spaceship that resembles 'Rover' from 'The Prisoner', a smartly dressed visitor from the African continent - where civilisation now resides since Europe blew itself to smithereens - is confronted by a scantily clad savage (her skimpy outfit enhanced by wrist-length gloves) played by Ms Hessling; and joins her in an energetic dancing duel facilitated by some pretty far-out trick photography. (Renoir anticipates Kubrick by forty years by going into negative to depict his flight.) The 'minstrel' makeup worn by Johnny Hudgins in the lead can't be blamed on Renoir since it was adopted by Hudgins himself in his stage act of the time.

If this had ever been intended for public exhibition it would have been a supreme example of pre-code filmmaking. Great fun.

Silent Renoir

[Michael_Elliott · 26 February 2008]

Charleston Parade (1927)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

Extremely bizarre short film from Jean Renoir is somewhat sci-fi and somewhat musical. A man in blackface takes off in a spaceship and lands in an unknown country. In this country he meets a white woman (Catherine Hessling; the director's wife) who does a tribal dance, which the blackface man believes is from his native people. I'm really not sure what the hell this film is suppose to be about but I can only guess it has something to do with reverse racism. There are several racial comments made by the white girl and her "not liking black meat" and I guess her being the "native" doing a tribal dance was the reverse thing from the black man doing it, which is something we've seen in countless films from this period. The DVD doesn't feature any music score so it was somewhat hard to know the nature the director was going for. An interesting short to say the least.

Surreal and fun

[vincentserrado-92311 · 10/10 · 31 December 2023]

This short film will let you puzzled as it's totally surreal and doesnt seems to be deep at all.

The visual effects are quite dope for its time and the chemistry between the actors great. Plus it made me discover Johnny Hudgins which had a great charisma.

Its difficult to had anything more to the review cause it's a really short film so here is a quote from the French journalist Simon Linguet, in 1763, published a description of wage slavery:

" The slave was precious to his master because of the money he had cost him ... They were worth at least as much as they could be sold for in the market ... It is the impossibility of living by any other means that compels our farm labourers to till the soil whose fruits they will not eat and our masons to construct buildings in which they will not live ... It is want that compels them to go down on their knees to the rich man in order to get from him permission to enrich him ... what effective gain has the suppression of slavery brought him ? He is free, you say. Ah! That is his misfortune ... These men ... Have the most terrible, the most imperious of masters, that is, need. ... They must therefore find someone to hire them, or die of hunger. Is that to be free?"

Your Ain't Heard Nothing Yet...

[LobotomousMonk · 10/10 · 16 February 2013]

Decidedly, we haven't heard anything yet from Renoir, as Sur un Air de Charleston is a silent short film. There is surrealist dream logic in the drawing of the phone which then becomes real, as well as Dadaist elements like the slipping on the waxed ground. It is another effort by Renoir to play around with the medium... but perhaps something else is at the heart of the matter. The film hails jazz culture as being timeless and universal underscored by flipping colonialist stereotypes on their head (the white cannibal, the black space explorer/time traveler). There is a theme of savagery that runs through the film that I consider to be extremely tongue-in-cheek. I conjecture that the film was an homage to the Jazz Singer in many ways - perhaps not that particular film text per se, but more generally the hype that would have existed in the industry at the time about the shift to sound and the potential of films like the Jazz Singer to accomplish the feat. It is difficult to deny that Sur un Air de Charleston requires sound for the pleasure of spectators at the time (ironically there were none), but equally undeniable that the sound should come from a synchronized soundtrack. I simply feel this way because of the manipulation of the dancing through editing where Renoir presents the dance in three or more temporal states. It feels to me that Renoir was imagining sound techniques prior to their industrial application. Why not release the film at the time then? My two answers are that Renoir would have been unsatisfied with the anachronistic homage (the film was silent) and that he may not have sought to offend many of his filmmaker colleagues who would soon be reeling against the introduction of sound film.