Thanks to research by Dirk Hoyer of the Baltic Film University in Tallinn, we now know that Kirsanoff was neither a Slav nor a White Russian. He was born Markus David Kaplan in a Jewish Lithuanian community in Tartu, Estonia in 1899. In 1919, his father was assassinated by the Bolsheviks. He emigrated to France the following year and adopted the name Dimitri Kirsanoff, in homage to a character in Turgenev’s novel Fathers and Sons. He studied music with Pablo Casals and played cello in several Paris cinema orchestras, where his contemporary and friend Jean Grémillon accompanied him on violin.
Kirsanoff soon found a muse and friend in Geneviève Lebas (1900-1980), a petite, blue-eyed Breton girl who had come to Paris determined to break into cinema. Following Kirsanoff’s example, she took a Russian name: Nadia Sibirskaïa. Together, these two faux Russians started a collaboration that would leave a brief but indelible mark on independent cinema in France.
The sordid story of Ménilmontant, which is only 40 minutes long and has no intertitles, evokes the fate of two orphan sisters who move to Paris and fall prey to a man who leaves one of them with a child, and drives the other to prostitution. Filmed on location in what was then a deprived district of Paris, Kirsanoff’s film tells the story employing all the means of the avant-garde. (Although Kirsanoff was assisted by an elderly and experienced professional cameraman, he always claimed that he had operated the camera himself.) In February 1926, the influential critic Jean Tedesco chose Ménilmontant to open the second season of his repertory cinema in Théâtre du Vieux Colombier (two titles were programmed, the other being Chaplin’s The Pilgrim). It was an instant success. Ménilmontant was also a personal triumph for Sibirskaïa, whose harrowing performance generated reviews comparing her to Lillian Gish and Alla Nazimova. But Kirsanoff was not cut out for success. His next two films, Destin and Sables, setting too much store on commercial imperatives, did not manage to reproduce the magic of Ménilmontant, and his captivating short film, Brumes d’automne, was overlooked in the rush of the first talking pictures.

World première of the print restored by Lobster Films, La Cinémathèque française and CNC, in collaboration with BFI.

Lenny Borger