Jon Mirsalis on Piano Ivan Mosjoukine's extravagant wit and flamboyant personality made him the best known of a group of White Russian emigré artists making films in Paris in the early twenties under the rubric of Films Albatros. Also among this group were directors V. Tourjansky (see Ce Cochon de Morin, February 15) and Alexandre Volkoff (see Casanova, also starring Mosjoukine, February 27), cinematographer Nicolas Toporkoff, and designer Alexandre Lochakoff. Their films embodied a spirit-of excess, imagination and irony-not yet found in French films and their influence on the French cinema was considerable. (Le Brasier ardent, incidentally, singularly convinced a young Jean Renoir to make films. "The audience howled and hooted, shocked by this spectacle so different from their usual pablum," he wrote. "I was ravished.") Le Brasier ardent is a surreal romp that parodies several genres (bourgeois melodrama, the serial, the detective motif) and synthesizes a number of international styles while creating its own bizarre psychological mood. "(It) was written, in part, as a vehicle for (Mosjoukine's) own mercurial presence as an actor," Richard Abel writes in French Cinema: The First Wave. "His penchant for eccentric fantasy and comedy made him a Protean master of disguise, a synthesis of character types," and in the film he portrays nearly a dozen different roles. A visually astounding nightmare sequence (an amalgam of slow motion, superimpositions, rapid montage and surrealistic decor) sets the tone for the film: a woman is stalked by a dashing man who becomes, by turns, her lover, a bishop, a beggar, a heretic burning at the stake (all are Mosjoukine, of course). Only a dream, but its images and structure are reinterpreted in the narrative which follows. This involves a vamp, Elle (Nathalie Lissenko) and her wealthy husband (Nicolas Koline), whose marriage is forged on mutual doubts. He hires a certain Detective Z-the very man of her dreams-to track her down with the marriage contract she has stolen, but instead said Z steals her away. This dark charade on love and freedom concludes in an "outrageous parody of l'amour fou" (Abel). We have shown a shortened version of Le Brasier ardent at PFA, and this will be our first screening of the complete print from the Cinémathèque Française.