The following post is just an excuse to put up a picture of Nadia Sibirskaïa

Pauline Kael said Ménilmontant was her favourite movie. She was fibbing -- everyone knows it was Last Tango -- but it's pretty great anyway, for the following reasons:

• It's avant-garde, yet narrative!
• It has montage!
  
• It doesn't have any of those annoying intertitles!
• It's only 37 minutes long!
  
• Nadia Sibirskaïa out-Gishes the Gishes!
  
• The park bench scene is (Kael) "as great as anything in Chaplin". This presumably includes the Dance of the Rolls!

You can download all 350 Megs of the thing over at UbuWeb (RIGHT click on the link; don't even think about streamiong it). But you'd be better off getting the double-disc set Avant-garde: Experimental Cinema of the 1920s and 30s, which has emergent films from Duchamp and Léger and some people who actually know how to make movies, like Man Ray and that Welles guy. Thank you Kino!