Kirsanoff, the Russian emigré filmmaker whose remarkable Menilmontant (1926) was a precursor of French poetic realism, continued making experimental cinema into the thirties. Rapt is set in the Swiss Alps, amid avid German-French rivalries. Following a stone-throwing incident which leads to the death of a young goatherd, a young German-speaking woman (Dita Parlo) is abducted and taken to the village of her French-speaking captor; there she remains, the object of fear, suspicion, and desire. Kirsanoff's style is at once angular, sensual and direct; in Rapt there is, as well, "a mixture of the fantastic, of violent eroticism, and practically spellbinding cruelty...a tonic contraction of raw truth and unreality...; the shadows dance..." (Hervé Dumont) Most remarkable is Kirsanoff's experimentation, in collaboration with composers Honegger and Hoérée, with contrapuntal sound.