Rien que les heures

This short French film is from a collection of experimental films entitled "Avant-Garde: Vol. 3:" and is from Disc 1. It's a collection of films that most folks today would probably care very little about, but for some reason I like seeing many of these unusual little art films. Perhaps you will also.

"Nothing But Tim e" is an odd little film that purports to say that all cities are basically the same. However, as if shows tons of footage of Paris and lots of art by folks living there, it sure seems obvious that Paris sure ain't like other cities. Having just returned from Paris yesterday (seriously), I can assure you it's nothing like any other city I have ever visited! One unusual film technique used in the film were taking live scenes and having them become stationary--and then having a hand tear up the scene which is now revealed to be a photo. This was wildly innovative for 1930 as were the low camera angles that must have come from moving cars, a strange but well done cow butchering scene (don't worry--it's not really very gross), closeups of rats and an overall focus on the lives of the city's poor, occasional low-lifes and often ordinary residents. All in all, it's well-constructed and a nice little homage to the less glamorous side of Paris. And, for an art film, it's very watchable and worth your time--as well as a nice historical document of the lives of these folks.

By the way, you might notice a brief scene where water is being poured over a sugar cube on some sort of spoon. This is Absinthe being prepared. Back in 1930, it was thought to be a horribly addictive and deadly spirit abused by the poor that only in the last decade or so has been de-criminalized around the world (because it's basically harmless). It sure made me thirsty, as it's a delicious little drink and should you get a chance, try it by all means!

At times rather slow and yet all the time it gives you details of a time forgotten and lost, when there were no washing machines, no computers, television, the streets were quieter, and life was a little bit slower... My goodness have we lost a lot. The copy I saw had no music whatever, and I'm not sure if that was intentional. But it was lovely, as if it were made to be sent into outer space for people of another world to see what life is like on Earth. Maybe it was meant for us modern day people, for whom life has become like meat on a hotplate, so we can see what life was like in a time when, even if it was still difficult (for when is life ever easy?), it wasn't so destructive to our inner lives. As you can't seem to be able to get a copy of this anywhere, I'd try scouring libraries for it.

A top-notch experimental film that stood out in the year 1926 was Brazilian-born, French resident/director Alberto Calvalcanti. He and a small crew went throughout Paris filming normal life of everyday people and sites. His "Rien Que Les Heures (Nothing But Time)" formed a new category of documentaries, labeled 'City Symphonies." Calvalcanti's was the first of such films that captured the pulse of a city and the people that make up such a teeming metropolis. His short 45-minute examination of Paris serves as a time capsule of daily life during the mid-1920s.

Like all city symphonies, the documentary is a snapshot on one of the more advanced cities in Western civilizations instead of previous examinations on exotic faraway cultures. There are snippets of drunks passed out on the street, pet dogs getting a haircut with manual cutters, and couples embracing on the city public avenues. One montage shows the process of how the process of meat begins at the slaughter house, goes on to the butcher shop, then ends up in restaurant table where a diner is enjoying his steak dinner.

Cavalcanti's final conclusion in illustrating these common urban activities is humans spend the majority of their lives on working for several essentials, including food, shelter and love. And time equally eludes our grasp. Living humans can't stop time, which as much as we all would like, the director highlighted this fact by calling his city symphony "Nothing But Time." In this universe, time marches on.

In 1920's Avantgardists and other filmmakers developed a certain genre of documentary, which today is known as city symphony. During the time European cities started to grow and the populations of them reached millions, this offered a challenge for cinema to which only documentary was capable to answer. City symphonies were documentaries that tried to capture the life of a city and create something beautiful out of it; stories about people who live around others without knowing each other. The most famous city symphonies that have survived the test of times are: Dziga Vertov's The Man with a Movie Camera (1929) which is also an important film for the Soviet Montage Cinema, Walter Ruttmann's Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927) and Jean Vigo's À propos de Nice (1930). Rien que les heures stands out as an original film as Ruttmann, for instance, was interested in people as masses, Cavalcanti was interested in people as individuals.

City symphony is often considered as a thing for the 20's and sometimes it's actually quite hard to draw the line between the films that are city symphonies and those that aren't. In city symphonies there was usually not much of explanation, the amount of inter texts was marginal and there usually was no commentary track at all. But a later city symphony The Seine meets Paris (1957) by Joris Ivens has a poetic commentary track by the poet Jacques Prevert. To my mind the propaganda classic Listen to Britain (1942) by Humphrey Jennings is quite controversial: usually it isn't considered as a city symphony but it quite well describes the life of London during the war and it has no commentary track nor intermediate texts.

Alberto Cavalcanti's Rien que les heures or Nothing but the Hours was the first city symphony to be made, which soon became a trend. Trust me, it was made in 1926 even that IMDb suggests that it was made in 1930. John Grierson commented the film quite aptly: "Paris is dominated by strong contrasts: ugliness and beauty, richness and poverty, hope and fears. For the first time there was a reason to use the word 'symphony' instead of a 'story'." The director himself said that his film was the first film which had a sociological perspective: all the other documentaries till that day had only filmed sun sets and no one had showed what happened around us. There is something true in Cavalcanti's statement but I wouldn't say that it was the first sociological film or a film which realized to show the life around us. For instance Robert Flaherty had already made a few very good documentaries of which Nanook of the North (1922) is probably the most well known and often considered as the very first documentary (the first film of which the term was used. Of course the first films by the Lumiere brothers were "documentaries" too.)

The film is a story of Paris with its alleys, people, adventures, monuments and gutters. It's also an important film about time and the course of it and, as the title suggests, the main subject of the film is time itself: "We can define the state of film and stop the time." (Cavalcanti) It's also a film about the life of a great city - Paris. In the beginning of the film it is mentioned that many artists have tried to describe cities in their own ways but only a series of quick images that follow each other - montage, can truly build a picture of a city. As Cavalcanti starts painting this picture, the film turns out to be a satirical city symphony filled with unforgettable images: a doll in the gutter and rats eating leftovers, a dead cat lying in the street with a homeless man, the montage of trash and food in which the theme of beauty and ugliness culminates, a man playing a string-less violin, a man cleaning a rag and another man cleaning a dog in the water at the beach.

In addition to these humorist images there's one quite radical scene: a man eating a steak and suddenly the plate turns into a stage of murder when we are shown images of a slaughterhouse on the plate. Cavalcanti brilliantly edits the shots of the slaughterhouse with the expressions of the man. The construction of state in Nothing but the Hours is excellent. The way how Cavalcanti builds our image of Paris is lovely and sometimes ugly.

Rien que les heures is the most 'Avantgarde' and experimental film of all the films by Cavalcanti. It's also one of the films that have stood the test of times pretty well - many of the films of the time have been forgotten. Reasons for this are probably the humorous and the modesty of the film: it doesn't try to be the greatest Avantgarde film of the decade. Nothing but the Hours is a documentary about the life of a city and the drama of the fleeting hours, which we cannot stop. It studies on the state of film, the course of time and, also man. Cavalcanti was very interested in studying people and here city equals people. Alongside with Dimitri Kirsanoff's Menilmontant (1926) Nothing but the Hours stands out as one of the most experimental, and finest, films of the French Avantgarde.

"Only monuments separate cities from each other. Sadness and joy are the same everywhere."