Enredo

An absolute dada movie. Somebody gets killed, his coffin gets out of control and after a chase it stops. The person gets out of it and let everybody who followed the coffin dissapear.

René Clair and Erik Satie jump near a cannon which is aimed at the spectator and fires a cannon shot.The participants in a funeral procession begin to jump behind a camel-driven hearse. The cart comes off and everyone tries to chase him until the coffin falls to the ground, the dead comes out and makes the coffin disappear with the magic wand and all vanish. René Clair passes through the sign of the end, falls to the ground, receives a kick and returns back.—luigicavaliere

Heralded as a cinematic masterpiece, René Clair's extraordinary avant-garde film was originally created as an entr'acte, or intermission, between two acts of Francis Picabia's 1924 ballet, Relâche, at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris. Taking René Clair's interest in Dadaism into account, the short film stages a surrealistic amalgamation of zany and unrelated scenes, pitting the revolutionary artist Marcel Duchamp against the American surrealist Man Ray in a game of chess with unforeseen consequences. And amid strange ballerinas, a loaded cannon, a mysterious funeral procession, rifle-range dummies, and a slow-paced camel, the elements of technology, mortality, life, and death define René Clair's shot-by-shot visual composition.—Nick Riganas