Rien que les heures (1926)
Directed by Alberto Cavalcanti

Film Review

After gaining admission to the world of filmmaking as a set designer for Marcel L'Herbier, Alberto Cavalcanti made his directorial debut with this groundbreaking documentary, which rates as one of his most impressive works.  Although he is best-known for the handful of films he made at Ealing Studios in the 1940s - British classics that include Went the Day Well? (1942), Champagne Charlie (1944) and Dead of Night (1945) - Cavalcanti started out as one of the Parisian avant-garde and for his first film, Rien que les heures (a.k.a. Nothing But Time), he embraces the impressionistic style of his contemporaries - L'Herbier, Abel Gance, Germaine Dulac, Jean Epstein and Dimitri Kirsanoff.  Indeed, it serves as an effective companion-piece to Kirsanoff's better known Ménilmontant (1926), both films providing an unfamiliar and distinctly unromantic view of the City of Lights.

Rien que les heures is an early example of a genre of documentary that has come to be known as the 'city symphony', a kind of film that seeks to draw out the true ethos of the modern bustling city by examining the relationship between an urban landscape and the people who inhabit it.  Jean Vigo's À propos de Nice (1930) is perhaps the best known example of this genre, and another is Walter Ruttmann's Die Sinfonie der Großstadt (1927), a portrait of Berlin to which Cavalcanti lent his support.  Like Vigo's film, Cavalcanti's Rien que les heures has an unmistakable anti-bourgeois slant to it and on the few occasions the bourgeoisie appear on screen it is with an obvious sense of derision.

At the start of the film, Cavalcanti makes it clear he has no interest in the fashionable set.  A brief shot of a group of young socialites freezes into a photographic still, which is then torn to pieces and discarded as worthless trash.  Later on, one of the bourgeois élite is happily consuming a steak.  In his plate, Cavalcanti superimposes the image of cattle being slaughtered and butchered - an allusion perhaps to the idle rich feeding on the carcasses of the poor?  His appetite for bourgeois-baiting sated, Cavalcanti can then focus on the more worthy subjects, the hard working poor and human detritus littering the dreary backstreets of Paris.

A bent old woman wanders aimlessly before collapsing, laundrywomen toil without complaint, unemployed men try to fill their empty hours, a sailor on leave seeks out his girlfriend, and everywhere tramps are seen lying neglected in the streets.  Occasionally, we are offered a glimpse of the easier life enjoyed by the better off, but it is Paris's unseen, malodorous underbelly that interests Cavalcanti most, and having watched the film you feel that you have seen the true face of the capital, the heart that throbs beneath the cold marble façade.

Film Synopsis

All cities would look alike if it were not for the monuments which tell them apart.  This is not a depiction of the rich and fashionable set, but of the poor and downtrodden who eke out modest lives in the eternal city of Paris.  In the slum districts, far from the gaze of tourists, the narrow streets are awash with tramps, prostitutes and stray derelicts, whilst honest workers go about their business, regardless of the wealth being squandered in the city's more salubrious neighbourhoods.  When evening comes and the day's work is done, it is time for pleasure, but danger lurks in some streets...