Here’s what transpires in the astonishing first 56 seconds of Ménilmontant, Dimitri Kirsanoff’s 1926 avant-garde masterpiece.
Delicate curtains flutter inside a home’s open window. Suddenly, a woman’s frightened face appears behind them, an assailant trailing. The doorknob turns frantically. The door finally opens and the woman emerges.
Robert Altman strikes again. This will be the last one for a while, I promise.
As in his previous Song for a Sunday entries McCabe and Mrs. Miller and Popeye, Altman’s neo-noir The Long Goodbye leans so heavily on its idiosyncratic score for mood and meaning(s) that it’s hard to imagine the film without it.
Reflecting, in 1967, on the experience of seeing old movies on TV, notorious curmudgeon/amazing writer Pauline Kael wrote, “Horror and fantasy films … are surprisingly effective, perhaps because they are so primitive in their appeal that the qualities of the imagery matter less than the basic suggestions.