Pierre Batcheff and Stardom in 1920s French Cinema

Pierre Batcheff was a prominent cinema star of the 1920s, a French Valentino best-known to modern audiences as the protagonist of the avant-garde classic, Un chien andalou (1929). Unlike other stars, Batcheff moved within intellectual circles, especially the Surrealists. This biography places the silent screen star within the context of 1920s popular cinema and its male stars. Batcheff's life exemplifies the tensions between "popular" and the "intellectual" as cinema& mdash;the subject of intense intellectual interest across Europe& mdash;became categorized somewhere between commercialism and "art." Major films studied in detail include: Le Double amour (Epstein, 1925), Feu Mathias Pascal (L'Herbier, 1925), Éducation de prince (Diamant-Berger, 1927), Le Joueur d'échecs (Bernard, 1927), La Sirène des tropiques (Etiévant and Nalpas, 1927), Les Deux timides (Clair, 1928), Un chien andalou (Buñuel, 1929), Monte-Cristo (Fescourt, 1929), and Baroud (Ingram, 1932).