Charleston Parade (1927)
** 1/2 (out of 4)
Extremely bizarre short film from Jean Renoir is somewhat sci-fi and somewhat musical. A man in blackface takes off in a spaceship and lands in an unknown country. In this country he meets a white woman (Catherine Hessling; the director's wife) who does a tribal dance, which the blackface man believes is from his native people. I'm really not sure what the hell this film is suppose to be about but I can only guess it has something to do with reverse racism. There are several racial comments made by the white girl and her "not liking black meat" and I guess her being the "native" doing a tribal dance was the reverse thing from the black man doing it, which is something we've seen in countless films from this period. The DVD doesn't feature any music score so it was somewhat hard to know the nature the director was going for. An interesting short to say the least.
