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Rien que les heures (Nothing But Time)

Director: Alberto Cavalcanti
Year: 1926
Run-time: 46 min
Source: Youtube

This French avant-garde film by a Brazilian director makes for an interesting counterpoint to the short film Manhatta.  While that film displays Manhattan from on high (showing it, probably unintentionally, to be an urban dystopia to rival Metropolis), Rien que les heures wants to show Paris from the ground up.  We get compelling shots of alleyways, garbage, and stray animals.  Amidst this are little mini-narratives about nameless characters, without coherent beginnings or ends.

This film has been mentioned as a forerunner of Bunuel's films, but there's not much surrealism on display, apart from an excellent little vignette in which scenes from a slaughterhouse are overlaid on a man's steak, and a wonderful shot that edits eyes together, which was turned into the film's poster.  Rien seems instead to be a mini-thesis on film's ability to rediscover the beauty of ordinariness.  Watching it today, I find it interesting how many of its images are impossible to date.

The film also demonstrates just how quickly the Soviet theory of montage was spreading.  The era of the long, static shot, seen in Feuillade's serials for example, has officially ended.  Rien wants to say something profound with its rapid cuts, and there are some extra juxtapositions, but without proper context I can't quite figure out what the message is.




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