Unless otherwise stated, reference to works by Cendrars are from Blaise Cendrars, ffuvres ComplPtes, Tomes I-VIII (Paris: Denorrl, 1961–65), henceforth O.C. All four essays are reprinted in the collection Trop c’ est trop (1957). His text ‘Chasse a l’Elephant’, closely based on poems from his 1924 collection Documentaires, makes reference to a film about the life of elephants made in Egypt and the Upper Sudan. Cendrars recounts the filming of La Venus noire in the essays ‘Un Homme heureux’ and ‘Pompon’. On the Brazilian film project, see ‘Etc, Etc. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. The early 1920s saw him making a film entitled Black Venus at the Rinascimiento studios in Rome, and he refers in a number of quasi-autobiographical essays to having made documentaries in the mid-1920s in Sudan and Brazil 1 none of these, however, has survived, and it is tempting to speculate as to whether such accounts as these owe more to Cendrars’s self-mythologising than to fact. A decade later he collaborated with Abel Gance on J’Accuse and La Roue, and wrote the screenplay of another project, Les Atlantes. At the age of twenty-two, while staying in London in 1909, he shared a miserable room with an aspiring entertainer by the name of Charlie Chaplin. His entry to the film world was no less wholehearted. His pre-First World War poetry, like that of his friend and contemporary Guillaume Apollinaire, expresses wonderment at the advent of the flying machine unlike Apollinaire, though, Cendrars actually worked with Blériot on his first aeroplanes. What makes Cendrars unusual, though, is the extent to which his art is an extension of his life. It was not long before this name was associated throughout France with one of the most distinctive poetic voices on an avant-garde scene fascinated with fast travel, telegraphy and scientific progress. The biography of Blaise Cendrars is the stuff of legend: in the summer of 1912, the twenty-five year old Swiss Freddie Sauser boarded a ship in New York bound for Paris, with a new poem in his suitcase and a new identity.
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