Shot in three days on a practically zero budget, using film stock
left over from Nana, Jean Renoir made this strange curio just for
fun. He never edited it. It was never released. He later gave the
footage to the Cinémathèque Française, who pieced
the film together. The story: it's the year 2028. An explorer from
Central Africa (Johnny Huggins, a jazz dancer of the 1920s, who appears
here in minstrel makeup; he actually was black) arrives in a post-apocalyptic
Paris in a flying sphere. He encounters a scantily-clad wild girl
and her monkey friend. The girl dances the Charleston to try to seduce
him. He thinks she's threatening him and he runs away. She chases
after him, dancing ever more aggressively and seductively. The explorer
begins to watch, hesitantly, but curiously. The girl draws a telephone
on the wall, which turns into a real telephone, and she calls some
kind of disembodied human head with wings. Some other winged disembodied
heads appear. The girl hands the phone to the explorer, and one of
the heads speaks to him--apparently letting him know that the girl's
OK. Then the explorer and the girl dance the Charleston together.
The girl leaves with the explorer in his flying sphere, her tearful
monkey friend waving goodbye.
http://www.univ-nancy2.fr/renoir/