Shot in the Winter of 1924, this film – director Kirsanoff’s most famous – opens sensationally with the murder of the two girl protagonists’ parents in front of their rural home. Orphaned, the girls decamp to Paris to make a living, where they end up in the working-class neighbourhood of Ménilmontant. Not only does it evince a certain brutality atypical of the time, ‘Ménilmontant’ is also a work of great visual and narrative modernism: doing away with intertitles and any semblance of the then-current Expressionist aesthetic, it runs riot with superimpositions, intense closeups and wild editing. Acknowledged as a masterpiece of silent cinema, the film gives a memorable portrayal of the 20th arrondissement as it was before gentrification set in.
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