Le rouge de Chine

Jacques Richard worked with Henri Langlois at the Cinematheque Francaise and in a way became one of the 'children of the cinematheque'. This is the film that most shows the effects of that experience.

Shot in a mixture of ultra-high contrast black and white and muted grainy colour images, it is, in many ways, a meditation on death.

But here is not the highly articulate narrative of La Chambre Verte. Le Rouge de Chine plays with images barely recognisable. Here there be vampires - the vampires of Feuillade as well as Murnau. This is non-narrative cinema, magical to those who want to push out the limits of cinema but excruciating to those who want only variations on that which they have already seen.

There are also wonderful moments of dislocation between image and sound. An avant garde film then? Yes and no. Yes because Richard takes a look at what cinema might be, no because it is evident to those who wish to see that he grounds his work in that matchlessly precious quality of stylistic innocence that made the silent cinema the art's most perfect expression.