In his search for "pure" cinema, René Clair followed the Dadaist approaches of photomontage (as advocated by John Heartfield—a technique which involved "the meeting place of a thousand spaces"), and the random (as advocated by Tristan Tzara). True to those premises, Clair juxtaposed images and events as disparate as a chess game played by Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, a cannon ignited by Erik Satie and Francis Picabia, a funeral where the coat of arms bearing the initials of Satie and Picabia was displayed, a ballerina, a sniper, inflatable balloon heads, the Luna Park rollercoaster, etc. These events were shot from a number of angles (including the ballerina from below through a plate of glass), and at varying speeds (from Satie and Picabia jumping toward the cannon in slow motion to the funeral procession racing off at the speed of the Keystone cops). While the images stressed the content as play, the director stressed the style as playfulness.

Through his film Clair invoked the entire catalogue of available cinematic techniques, abandoned the notion of narrative causality, and in true Dadaist style, espoused the overthrow of the bourgeois norm. The audience was assaulted with a series of non-related and often provocative images—from a "legless" man rising from his wagon and running away at full tilt, to a ballerina transformed into a bearded man—within a work which stressed the pleasure of inventing new spatial and temporal relations while provoking random laughter. While Clair often referred to this film as "visual babblings," audiences of today can see the film as a serious attempt to subvert traditional values, both cinematic and social.