BEYOND SLAPSTICK AND TIN PAN ALLEY.

The Avalon Quartet, now entering their twentieth year in residence at Northern Illinois University, opened the 2026-2027 recital season with a screening of Ménilmontant, a 1926 production, with musical accompaniment composed by a member of the ensemble.

I was intrigued enough to mess about with the university's online-only ticketing system and get a ticket purchased and printed out at home and check out the performance.  Perhaps I should have anticipated what I would be hearing and seeing precisely because it was an academic event.

One such piece of art that I like to save for an occasional Special Film Experience is a short masterpiece called Ménilmontant (1926). Maybe a few of you cinephiles recognize the name, since critic Pauline Kael said it was her favorite film. She explained that this obscure, 37-minute French silent directed by the little-known Dimitri Kirsanov had “a lyricism Chaplin could only dream of.” I’ll admit I watched it after reading Kael’s recommendation, and quickly realized that she was right.

That reference to Pauline Kael says everything about both the movie (oh, sorry, it's well into the class of production the intellectual types love to call filllllm, black and white by default, and depressing and gloomy by design) and Pauline Kael, the epitome of a literary intellectual living a most privileged life.

Surf over to that linked essay, dear reader, for an extended plot synopsis.

There is a great deal to study in Ménilmontant, whether its the masterful delvings into the psychology of its main characters or the poetic repetition of certain images. Above all, this film is poetic. We see shots of bare tree branches against winter skies, raw-looking ground, and the actors’ feet walking across cold cobblestones. There’s a subtle connection between both nature and human nature. Kirsanov can tell his tale with a shot as simple as a closeup of [leading lady Nadia] Sibirskaïa’s feet descending concrete steps toward the cold waters of the Seine before hesitating as she changes her mind about her fate.

Ménilmontant is a hardscrabble neighborhood of Paris.  The reviewer suggests the movie is not unrelievedly gloomy.

I love it for its atmosphere and delicacy, and admire it for its honesty and, strange to say, its refusal to lapse into cynicism. There is brutality and gritty poverty, but there is also hope. People can betray each other, but others can be merciful. There is debris and stained plaster in the alleyways of Ménilmontant, but the early morning sun can still peer in through the gloom. There is more truth here than in other films were everything ends in relentless despair and ugliness. It is timeless, moving, and showcases the very best of early French cinema.

So it might be, although the movie is well in the class of Earnest Humanities.

Disturbed people detailing their disturbed lives in more detail than the admittedly rudimentary Diagnostic and Statistical Manual can handle? But so it is with the "literary novel," particularly if you're trotting out Updike or DeLillo or Roth and the disturbed sort of "middle-to-upper-middle-class white male experience" implied thereby.

That post continued, "Dear reader, haven't we been at this place ever since the creative types sold the academic humanities, and the right well-heeled patrons, on the notion that their mental disorders, or perhaps their simple attention-seeking, were Profound?"  It's business at usual with the academic humanities, where slagging on your not-so-neurotic neighbors is what gets you the recognition.  That you get to work all sorts of morbid symbolism into your reading of a poem or the watching of a movie also gets you Minimal Publishable Units that might turn you into the very model of a Literary Intellectual with nothing to fear from the scorn of your not-so-neurotic neighbors, who, in common with Pauline Kael, you might not even know.