Entr’acte and The Seashell and the Clergyman

On December 4, 1924, the audience at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées was asked to attend the performance wearing dark glasses and earplugs. Moments later, on the screen, Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray are playing chess on the roof of a building in Paris, a funeral procession sets off down the street, and a camel pulls it through the city.

Thus begins Entr’acte by René Clair—a film created as an interlude for Francis Picabia’s ballet *Relâche* and one of the last great outbursts of Dadaist anarchy. Erik Satie composed one of the first synchronized film scores in history for it, and the film itself shatters the classical logic of cinema through slapstick, slow motion, double exposures, and pure absurdity.

Four years later, the premiere of The Seashells and the Shepherd by Germaine Dulac at the Studio des Ursulines in Paris ended in scandal. André Breton, Louis Aragon, and other members of the Surrealist group hurled insults at the director and vandalized the cinema’s lobby. The conflict centered on authorship and control over the surrealist film: Dulac – a feminist and theorist of “pure cinema” – treated Antonin Artaud’s screenplay as material for her own vision. The result was a film made a year before The Andalusian Dog, which is now recognized as one of the first fully surrealist works in the history of cinema. It opens this story with conflict, scandal, and a refusal to submit to its own guardians.