This was the great French director Jean-Pierre Melville's first film, a short about two clowns working in France in Montmarte. It's very heavily skewed on being like a documentary, but it's a little too kidding to be taken too seriously. It's clear Melville didn't have (or just decided not to go for) recorded sound, so everything, with the exception of the final clown performance on stage that the '24 hours' is leading up to, is with a narrator filling in voices and the screen directions. It's awkward and kind of stilted, even as it's meant to be cute ("Here Beby reads one of his fan letters... here Beby gets his dog to pray, since they both pray to the same God")
It's been in obscurity for a long time and probably for good reason; it's hard for me to imagine Melville as someone who would go to a lot of clown events, and it was likely made to showcase that Melville could put something on film and present it to the public, which is fine. There is one sequence that made me smile where we see the other clown Marais changing up his make-up and a guy in the background keep changing up instruments (how he plays guitar synced up to him putting on make-up is pretty clever). But even at 18 minutes there seems like there's filler here, as we see a lot of pictures of former and/or current clowns in and out of make-up.
It's not really bad but it's just dry stuff, meant not so much for art as to fill up some time at the theaters in the period it was made, and for Melville completists; it's included on the blu-ray for Silence de la Mer.
It's been in obscurity for a long time and probably for good reason; it's hard for me to imagine Melville as someone who would go to a lot of clown events, and it was likely made to showcase that Melville could put something on film and present it to the public, which is fine. There is one sequence that made me smile where we see the other clown Marais changing up his make-up and a guy in the background keep changing up instruments (how he plays guitar synced up to him putting on make-up is pretty clever). But even at 18 minutes there seems like there's filler here, as we see a lot of pictures of former and/or current clowns in and out of make-up.
It's not really bad but it's just dry stuff, meant not so much for art as to fill up some time at the theaters in the period it was made, and for Melville completists; it's included on the blu-ray for Silence de la Mer.