At the end of 1960s René Clair found in the Archives of the Ballets Suédois, in Stockholm, the original copy of Entr’Acte as well as the prologue to Picabia and Satie’s ballet Relâche, which he decided to add to the 1924 film. Henri Sauguet’s work with the score – he conducted and adapted to fit a 24 f/s screening – was the first of a series of interventions that perpetuated confusion, throughout the years, as to how to synchronise the music to the film. Later on, Darius Milhaud’s transcription for piano, left out significant instructions provided by Roger Désormière, who had first conducted the score in 1924. While the score Cinéma originally accompanied Entr’Acte, the music to go with the ‘prologue’ was to be found in Relâche. For the first time, thanks to Ornella Volta and the Satie Archives’ generous support in providing the original manuscripts of the score by Satie, we will be able to hear a very close version of how the composer intended to synchronise the music to the film. This simple and fun music is a playful accompaniment to this cinematic interval, and it is very representative of Satie’s abstract work of the 1920s. The funeral march is represented by a respectful dirge that, musically, goes widely out of control. The film ends as it begins with the opening music now serving as a finale as if to say: “ashes to ashes”.

Timothy Brock

Entr’acte provides an elegant key to the entire oeuvre [of René Clair] and reveals at a single blow all the themes, plastic elements, dynamics, emotions, morals, all the constants which will continue to grow, flower, intertwine: dream, fairy tale, ballet, chases, rhythm, that essential, inevitable linkage, vitality that is an end in itself. Roofs of Paris, the bric-a-brac of scavengers, ballerinas, black-clad men, officials, fake invalids, amusement parks, fairground attractions, décors in primitive style, circuses, toboggans, riding schools. It is the paradise of childhood. All that is lacking – at first sight – is the heart. And hence Clair appropriates it from the confession of Une saison en enfer: “I loved stupid pictures, over-doors, decorations, paintings of acrobats, signs, popular illuminations, tales of our grandmothers, fairy tales, little books for children, old operettas, idiotic refrains, simple rhythms”. Love cannot be lacking.

Barthélemy Amengual, René Clair, Seghers, Paris, 1969