Violons d'Ingres

Violons d'Ingres (literally "Violins of Ingres"), released in English-speaking markets as Hobbies Across the Sea and as Creation and Recreation,[1] is a 1939 French short surrealist documentary film directed by Jacques B. Brunius, in collaboration with Georges Labrousse.

Jacques B. Brunius, a French artist active in the Surrealist movement, did much work in the French film industry in the 1930s. In addition to acting onscreen, he assistant-directed feature films, directed short advertisements, wrote film reviews, and made seven documentary films, the last of which was Violons d'Ingres.[2]

The sequence featuring Georges Méliès was directed by Méliès in 1933, as an advertising film for the Régie des Tabacs of France, commissioned by Brunius and Jean Aurenche.[3] The 28-second sequence, a trick film featuring two uses of the substitution splice technique Méliès had made famous, is notable as his final completed work as a film director.[4]

The film is directed and edited in a surrealistic style, freely departing from the representative realism standard for documentary films of the time.[5] The title derives from the French phrase violon d'Ingres, meaning a hobby or avocation; it refers to the celebrated nineteenth-century painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, who played the violin for enjoyment. A story goes that, when hosting visitors at his studio, Ingres demanded they listen to his amateur violin efforts rather than study his acclaimed paintings.[5] The film praises hobbyist artistry, inviting the viewer to think of amateur work in terms of childlike creativity and imagination surviving through adulthood.[6]

Violons d'Ingres premiered at the 1939 New York World's Fair.[1] It was also screened at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive in 1990,[5] and at the Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival in 2015.[7] It remains the best-known of the seven documentaries made by Brunius.[2] A 2013 essay in the Journal of Film Preservation, highlighting the themes of amateur artistry and of "the survival of the childhood spirit", named it as Brunius's "most personal film".[6]