Apart from Vingt-quatre heures en trente minutes (1929), Lods also made Champs-Élysées (1929). Like the former Paris film, Champs-Élysées was also sponsored by the aristocratic cinephiles Vicomte de Noailles and Étienne de Beaumont.
In 1935, Grierson praised Lods (together with Ivens and Ruttmann) as a “master of camera” and a “master of montage” while Harry Potamkin, in an article on “The Montage Film” in the February 1930 issue of Movie Makers, was rather critical of the films by Lods and Kaufman. Probably referring to Champs-Élysées, Potamkin reproached the filmmakers for attempting to include too much in their films. “The work of Lods and Kaufman,” he wrote, “defeats its expert photography and rhythmic reiterations by going in for too many sequences. The final caption of the film, ‘Etc,’ nearly characterizes its interminable succession of scenes.”
Champs-Élysées was screened at the second Congrès International du Cinéma Indépendant (CICI 2) in Brussels in 1930, its program also including Vigo’s À propos de Nice (1930). In Les Beaux-Arts, André Cauvin compared the two films that shared Kaufman’s camerawork: “A film on Nice by Vigo and Kaufman. It enables us to link it with Champs-Élysées by Lods and Kaufman. Some discoveries but a uniform style. Always the same rhythm.” Another anonymous critic wrote in Beaux-Arts,
Jean Lods and Boris Kaufman skillfully use things we have seen too much. The perspective of the Avenue des Champs-Élysées, which we are familiar with from the beginning of so many films accompanied by the intertitle ‘In Paris,’ serves now as a background for their study on a public park astound by the heat.
Steven Jacobs
further reading
Anon., “Le IIe Congrès International du Cinéma Indépendant: Présentation de films inédits,” Les Beaux-Arts 8 (1930): 6.
Cauvin, André, “Le IIe Congrès International du Cinéma Indépendant,” Les Beaux-Arts 9 (1930): 6.
Potamkin, Harry, “The Montage Film,” Movie Makers (February 1930).
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