In 1926, the Hungarian-born artist Gyula Zilzer produced in Paris 176 unpublished drawings for two novels by Émile Zola — Nana and La Faute de l'abbé Mouret. The year is not incidental: Jean Renoir completed his silent film adaptation of Nana during those same months, at the studios in Neuilly and Munich. This article reads Zilzer's corpus as a visual object organised by a recognisable cinematographic grammar — systematic variation of shot scale, control of angle and point of view, diegetic lighting, shot/reverse-shot configurations, continuity cuts, and a quantifiable narrative ellipsis measured against the pagination of the Swedish manuscript (references Sid). The analysis rests on a drawing-by-drawing examination of all 176 images across nine formal devices (R1–R9). These devices are not incidental to the corpus. They constitute the operative vocabulary by which two narratively opposed sets — the katabatic descent of Nana and the truncated anabasis of Mouret — are formally differentiated from one another. The argument is that Zilzer's drawings occupy an analytically distinct position in the visual culture of the nineteen-twenties: neither conventional literary illustration nor storyboard for a projected film, but a formally complete visual object in which cinematographic procedure is the primary organising principle. The convergence of 1926 between Zilzer and Renoir — two independent visual interpretations of the same Zola text, produced in the same city in the same year — provides the historical frame.