René Clair
22 min
France 1924

René Clair’s Entr’acte, the translation of which means ‘between the acts’, was a film originally conceived to be shown in the interval of Francis Picabia’s radical Dadaist ballet Relâche. With a musical soundtrack devised by Erik Satie and a cast of celebrated Dadaist figures including Francis Picabia, Erik Satie, Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp, the first performance of this film was a greeted as a defining Dada event.

In the film Clair employs all the technical tricks-in-the-book, including speeding up and slowing down footage, uncanny visual superimpositions and jump-cuts to present the viewer with a world familiar, but made strange, and an irrational world in which a funeral march can become a race.

René Clair
(1898–81) France

René Clair was one of France’s leading directors and figurehead of early French cinema. Primarily known for his pioneering approach to sound film (Sous les toits de Paris, 1930, was particularly celebrated for its innovate sound techniques), although inspired early in his career by Dada and Surrealism, Clair would later make numerous conventional feature length and short films in France and America (including I Married a Witch , 1942, starring Veronica Lake) and was awarded Grand Prix du Cinéma Français in 1953. He was the first film director to be elected to the French Academy in 1962.

Rene Clair Ent’racte 1924 © courtesy of BFI, London ©