750 S. Spaulding Ave., Suite 112
Los Angeles, CA 90036

Essays, Manifestos, Statements, Speeches, Maxims, Epistles, Diaristic Jottings, Narratives, Natural histories, Poems, Plays, Performances, Ramblings, Revelations, and all such ephemera as may appear necessary to bring society into a slight tremolo of confusion and fright at least.

Films without Images

Blaise Cendrars

Translated from the French, with an Introduction by Mark Spitzer

Buy a PDF file

One of the last works by the great Swiss-French writer Blaise Cendrars, Films sans images is composed of three historical radio plays, written in collaboration with Nino Frank. Gilles de Rais, Sarejevo, and Le Divin Arétin were performed between 1954 and 1956, receiving considerable acclaim from the media as well as response from the audience of French National Television and Radio. So popular were these plays, that they were rebroadcast several times, resulting in book publication by Éditions Denoël in 1959.

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

Never before published in English Films without Images, translated by Mark Spitzer, will hopefully bring attention to Cendrars' dramatic writing talents, which include a long fascination of writing about and for film.