An afternoon of dazzling experimental silent films from the 1920s.

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The programme is anchored by Dimitri Kirsanoff’s masterpiece Ménilmontant’, pure melodrama in terms of story – two sisters move to Paris from the country where they are drawn into a tragic love triangle – but utterly extraordinary in execution.

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The plot is communicated entirely with imagery, without recourse to intertitles, and, most startlingly we open in medias res right in the thick of an axe murder conveyed in near-abstract montage. Thereafter Kirsanoff uses a wide palette of avant-garde techniques, all the while making lyrical, melancholy use of settings, especially the desolate working-class Parisian district of the film’s title.

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Ménilmontant screens here with the director’s later short Autumn Mists (1928) and a selection of works by his contemporary, Germaine Dulac, with music composed by the Electronic & Produced Music Department.