Mjeteconer Just perfect...

Tedfoldol everything you have heard about this movie is true.

Murphy Howard I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

Abegail Noëlle While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

zacknabo Entr'acte aka "In Between Acts" is a Dadaist, surrealist staple of early filmmaking. Garnering its name simply enough from being a short film made to show during the intermission of one of Eric Satie's surrealist ballets. This early avant-garde work does not rise to the level of Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali's Un Chien Andalou (1929) and L'Age d'Or (1930) or some of Man Ray's early stuff, but probably more entertaining than Ray. 92 years removed from this work and it is still an amazement to watch. The film begins with two foolish men jumping around a canon which is placed on top of a building overlooking Paris, appearing to argue which way to fire it or whether they should fire it at all. Finally, the cannon fires in slow motion effect directly toward the camera, one of the first of many Freudian phallic symbols in this 22 minute short. Next, there is the ballerina, mostly shot from below the glass she is elegantly dancing upon. These shots are also slowed. This our first psychoanalytic vaginal image (not as many as the phalli). The ballet sequences are some of the finest and inventive. The idea to have her dance on some sort of strong transparent material and have the camera below to make the appearance of the ballerina dancing on top of you is brilliant. Shooting up through transparent floor can be seen done masterfully 60 years later in Bela Tarr's Almanac of Fall. The dancing and the way in which it is filmed is majestic and ethereally and would be seen mastered a decade later by Nazi film propagandist and sports film innovator, Leni Riefenstahl, in Triumph of the Will and in the methods she used in filming Olympia, which was the 1938 Olympics. So why is this film still relevant? Because it has substantial influence in the history of cinema. Whatever your opinion may be the experimentation of early film is at the very least respectable and should be of interest. Entr'acte is an easily watchable early experimental film. The disorienting way in which Clair over-imposes images, specifically of building in the city to make it appear as if the world is at a tilt, upside down, or jutting separate ways all at once, is still fascinating today. The principles of those particular shots are the same camera tricks and editing techniques that can be seen today at major sporting events when before the game they impose images onto the basketball court and make it appear as if the floor is falling into some void or that the court is piece by piece falling apart while the logo at center court appears to rise and shift—it's the same principle, only 92 years ago and LeBron James isn't walking out afterwards for tip-off. Cinematic history should be studied, celebrated and truly appreciated for its bold inventiveness. All of this being said while in the final half of the film the narrative adventure begins. A man is killed and during the funeral procession his coffin, which is in the carriage mysteriously gets out of control and races through the city away from the mourners who have to chase it down in a wonderful comedic farce ala Keystone Cops. Finally the carriage gets outside the city and runs into an open field where the coffin slides out and bounces around the dirt. The mourners stand over the casket as magician pops out and methodically—with his wand—makes all of the mourners disappear. It is a Dadaist film. It could easily be read as a commentary on the absurdity of life and death. By allowing the coffin to get away and have the mourners turn to comedy, Clair effectively turns the idea of death on its head, illuminating the absurdity of death, as well as how often we encounter absurdity in life. And the ballerina keeps dancing and 92 years later she is still dancing, but only in between acts.

Eumenides_0 Surrealism was officially born in 1924, with the publishing of André Breton's Surrealist Manifesto. So it's quite possibly that René Clair's short movie of the same year may be the first cinematic expression of surrealism, preceding Luis Buñuel's An Andaluzian Dog by a few years.Working with a screenplay by Francis Picabia, a Dada/surrealist artist, Clair's movie is much in line with Buñuel's future movie. At times it's a collage and juxtaposition of disconnected images; but it has a story in it, about a coffin that runs away from a procession, forcing a mob to chase it.It's an entertainment, but for me it's not a great work of cinema. It's not as good as Clair's next movie, The Imaginary Voyage, for instance. Perhaps it has value for scholars of film history, but I don't see it as a movie that has stood the test of time, like Fritz Lang's 1921 movie, Destiny, which seems fresh and engaging still.

mrdonleone I just saw Entr'acte another time and I kept asking myself what was the meaning of this picture? I couldn't find any meaning in it: men running in slow motion, a roller-coaster ride, a lot of unclear images with movement, ... so maybe it is about movement? maybe there isn't any meaning at all, with the only meaning that life goes slow fast and normal at the same time, it depends on how you look at things. and how you look at things, is influenced by the feeling that you have on that particular moment. so maybe, if there is any meaning in the film, it's the message that we experience life as we want it to be. if we have fun, it goes fast. if we are bored, it goes slow. if we don't care, it goes on at a normal tempo.

F Gwynplaine MacIntyre Rene Clair and the Marx Brothers once decided to make a movie together: it's a shame that it never happened. Maybe that movie exists in some alternate universe, and I'll bet it's hilarious. I enjoyed "Entr'acte", but I'd gladly trade this film for a chance to see Rene Clair's Marx Brothers movie.Another IMDb reviewer has synopsised the plot, such as it is: a man apparently dies. After his funeral, his coffin escapes from its hearse, and then the man returns to life. The title "Entr'acte" (an interval between theatrical acts, or an intermission) is never explained; maybe it refers to the interval between that man's two lives. I prefer to think that Clair meant this somewhat amateurish film as a mere intermission: an amusing bit of fun between the acts of his 'real' films; the ones with coherent story lines.Some of the content in this film truly does seem to be unintentional. After the central character's funeral, there's a stiff wind blowing outside the chapel. The women in this movie wear elaborate long dresses, and the wind animates their clothing in a way that's distracting rather than funny, and surely not meant to be symbolic.Much of the imagery in this movie seems to be pure Dada rather than signifying anything. The man's funeral cortege is led by a camel. If there's any underlying significance there, I doubt that it amounts to much. Earlier on, I was intrigued by one sequence featuring Parisian chess players. While the camera focuses on the chessboard, a shot of Parisian traffic is superimposed: suggesting that all humanity are pawns in some cosmic chess game.Don't look for too much meaning in "Entr'acte". It's an amusing experiment, but might have been more effective at a shorter length.