Eugène Deslaw (1898–1966) was born in Ukraine (as Yevhen Slavchenko) and moved to France in 1922. His Nuits électriques is an abstract film that shares characteristics with city symphonies. Whereas Ruttmann’s Berlin, Cavalcanti’s Rien que les heures, or Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera take the city at night as only one element among many of urban life, Les Nuits électriques focuses exclusively on this aspect of urban modernity. Combining images of the nocturnal Paris and Berlin, Deslaw composes a little symphony of streetlights, electric signs, and illuminated façades—creating a “dream of light” evoking evenings in big cities with mysterious movements, invisible forces, machines, and various visual effects. Based on the contrast between dark, often completely black surroundings and moving lights, the filmic image often turns into a flat surface; transforming the city into an abstract background for the filmmaker’s play with light, geometric forms, lines, dots, and movement.
But Les Nuits électriques is also a film about the textual city—the signs, words, and slogans visible in the city at night. It is also a film about cinema itself, the light in the dark creating visual impressions—indeed, we see the signs of an Ufa cinema in passing. What’s more, it is a film about the manipulating forces and potentialities of cinema. The façade of a building appears illuminated with lines of lights, which transform the house into a negative of itself, a sort of skeleton or X-ray version. In fact, Deslaw intercuts his nocturnal images with negative shots of telephone poles and a factory chimney, transforming, with cinematic and photochemical means, actual daytime images into night as well.
Georges Sadoul called Les Nuits électriques, together with Deslaw’s Montparnasse (1930), “Parisian reportages.” After Les Nuits électriques, Deslaw made his famous La Marche des machines (1929), which also displays some parallels with the city symphony approach.
Eva Hielscher
further reading
Deslaw, Eugène, Ombre blanche, lumière noire. Introduction by Lubomir Hosejko (Paris: Éditions Paris expérimental, 2004).
Ghali, Noureddine, L’Avant-garde cinématographique en France dans les années vingt: idées, conceptions, theories (Paris: Éditions Paris expérimental, 1995).
Sadoul, Georges, Histoire générale du cinéma: 5. L’art muet 1919–1929, première volume: L’Après guerre en Europe (Paris: Denoël, 1975), 370.
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