Born in Kiev, Eugène Deslaw (Ievhen Slavchenko) settled in Paris after World War I and worked in all areas of the city's burgeoning film culture (as a projectionist, critic, and foreign correspondent as well as a cameraman and director). Electric Nights, the most visually expressive of his independent films, stands at the crossroads of the major modernist artistic movements of the 1920s. The celebration of artificial lights, amusement parks, and street signs in Paris, Berlin, London, and Prague looks back to the early "cinema of attractions," while the shifts in camera perspective and lyrical editing anticipate later American avant-gardists like Stan Brakhage.