Violons d'Ingres

Jacques B. Brunius, a French artist active in the Surrealist movement, did much work in the French film industry in the 1930s. In addition to acting onscreen, he assistant-directed feature films, directed short advertisements, wrote film reviews, and made seven documentary films, the last of which was Violons d'Ingres.^[2]

The sequence featuring Georges Méliès was directed by Méliès in 1933, as an advertising film for the Régie des Tabacs of France, commissioned by Brunius and Jean Aurenche.^[3] The 28-second sequence, a trick film featuring two uses of the substitution splice technique Méliès had made famous, is notable as his final completed work as a film director.^[4]

The film is directed and edited in a surrealistic style, freely departing from the representative realism standard for documentary films of the time.^[5] The title derives from the French phrase violon d'Ingres, meaning a hobby or avocation; it refers to the celebrated nineteenth-century painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, who played the violin for enjoyment. A story goes that, when hosting visitors at his studio, Ingres demanded they listen to his amateur violin efforts rather than study his acclaimed paintings.^[5] The film praises hobbyist artistry, inviting the viewer to think of amateur work in terms of childlike creativity and imagination surviving through adulthood.^[6]