It’s tempting to write off Jean Renoir’s
silent short Sur un air de Charleston as unworthy of attention: Renoir apparently
made it in just a few days, and some of its key elements are frankly painful to
observe now. Still, a little background reading, and one’s deep regard for
Renoir’s later work, suggests not so much that there’s more there than meets
the eye, as the phrase goes, as that a modern-day eye may find it hard across a
hundred-year distance to distinguish the mildly subversive from the cringeworthy.
The use of an African-American protagonist (Johnny Hudgins) is fairly remarkable
for the time, undermined by the use of minstrel get-up and blackface; learning
that this was at Hudgins’ initiation rather than Renoir’s makes that aspect of
the film more complex and perhaps knowingly provocative, but not enough so to
neutralize one’s basic antipathy. Still, accusations of condescension are
somewhat tempered by the fact of the film being set in a post-apocalyptic future
where Africa is the new hub of civilization, the protagonist traveling in his futuristic
craft to a decimated Europe seemingly occupied only by a scantily clad woman
and her companion ape; the woman shows off her dancing skills, in scenes that
were reportedly once considered erotic (the actress, Catherine Hessling, was
Renoir’s wife at the time) but now seem largely grotesque. Much about the film
is puzzling and contradictory: the premise sounds visionary, but the use to which
it’s put feels static and imaginatively limited; it uses slow motion to deepen
our engagement with Hessling’s dancing, but in other respects (like the ape
suit) feels wantonly shoddy; Renoir includes a couple of inventions which
suggest magical powers on the part of the woman, but it’s hard to see how that
relates to the broader scheme. Still, one may find it oddly lingering in the
mind, albeit in a way that’s not necessarily all welcome…
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