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Films without Images: Three Radio Plays

Blaise Cendrars

with Nino Frank
Translated from the French, with an Introduction by Mark Spitzer

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One of the last works by the great Swiss-French writer Blaise Cendrars, Films without Images comprises three historical radio plays, written in collaboration with Nino Frank:

1. Gilles de Rais, about the comrade-in-arms of Joan of Arc
2. Sarajevo, about the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand
3. The Divine Aretino, about the Renaissance poet Pietro Aretino

These popular plays were performed between 1954 and 1956, and rebroadcast several times, resulting in book publication by Éditions Denoël in 1959.

Cendrars has long been championed as a novelist and poet, but his reputation as a dramatist has not been well established, despite the fact that these works reached possibly millions of listeners, with Gilles de Rais winning the prestigious Carlos Larronde Award for the best drama of 1955.

Frank was the first film critic to use the term "film noir."