ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the film Les Nuits electriques directed by Eugene Deslaw. Deslaw was born in Ukraine and moved to France in 1922. His Nuits electriques is an abstract film that shares characteristics with city symphonies. Combining images of the nocturnal Paris and Berlin, Deslaw composes a little symphony of streetlights, electric signs, and illuminates façades—creating a "dream of light" evoking evenings in big cities with mysterious movements, invisible forces, machines, and various visual effects. The facade of a building appears illuminated with lines of lights, which transform the house into a negative of itself, a sort of skeleton or X-ray version. After Les Nuits electriques, Deslaw made his famous La Marche des machines, which also displays some parallels with the city symphony approach. It is also a film about cinema itself, the light in the dark creating visual impressions— indeed, we see the signs of an Ufa cinema in passing.
