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Showing posts with the label Alberto Cavalcanti

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 ordin...