Rien que les heures by Brazilian filmmaker and art director Alberto Cavalcanti (1897–1982) is a landmark film that played an important part in the development of the city symphony genre. Unmistakably a narrative film and not a documentary, its story involves the characters of a streetwalker, a woman who sells newspapers, a sailor, a landlady, an old woman, a shop keeper, and another man. Several narrative threads run through the film, though each serves to interrupt the other. An intertitle even states, “This film doesn’t tell a story. It is only a sequence of impressions of time passing and does not claim to synthesize any city.” Referring to Rien que les heures, John Grierson famously stated, “For the first time the word ‘symphony’ was used, rather than story,” but he didn’t specify by who. Perhaps it was because of its careful attention to its urban locations Rien que les heures that commentators like Grierson and Paul Rotha considered the film a documentary. In any case, it has been connected to the city symphony phenomenon ever since.
The film attempts to show the life of Paris over the course of one day in roughly 45 minutes. As the clock moves, people arrive for work, shops and restaurants open, and all kinds of activities take place. After work, it is time for relaxation. This temporal structure, which charts the times of day along with their characteristic activities, is the form that Ruttmann would adopt and expand upon for his Berlin the following year. However, in contrast to Ruttmann, Cavalcanti breaks temporal continuities, showing clock-faces that display incoherent time. Any attempt to understand the city according to the natural cycle of the day is subverted, as is any attempt to map the urban space in a coherent way. Furthermore, Rien que les heures lacks the encyclopedic impulse of Ruttmann’s Berlin and Cavalcanti is more interested in people as individuals than in the urban crowds that are featured in Ruttmann’s film.
Another striking difference with Ruttmann’s film is that, apart from some kaleidoscopic superimpositions of traffic at the end of the film, Cavalcanti avoids the grands boulevards with their traffic and crowded sidewalks. He focuses on the old Paris and its social conditions, creating a film about the “daily life of the humble, the déclassés,” as an intertitle states.
Rien que les heures’s representation of urban modernity also invokes comparisons to painting and photography, in addition to cinema. Indeed, the film opens with a series of shots showing depictions of Paris by notable painters, but it also shows its audience the Paris captured in mass-produced postcard views and kitschy souvenirs. Thus, the myth of Paris and its monuments is subverted from the start. Instead, the film focuses the spectator’s attention on a series of unforgettable images, such as a doll in the gutter and rats eating leftovers, a dead cat lying in the street with a homeless man, and a man cleaning a rag. Sharply contrasting motifs and striking montage effects disorient the viewer, such as in a sequence in which a man is eating a steak and suddenly we are shown images of a slaughterhouse on the plate. With its use of soft focus, close-ups, dissolves, and superimpositions, Rien que les heures became a hit in the ciné-clubs of Paris in 1926, and the film has stood as a landmark of avant-garde film ever since.
Steven Jacobs
further reading
Monegal, Emir Rodriguez, “Alberto Cavalcanti,” The Quarterly of Film, Radio, and Television 9, 4 (Summer 1955): 341–58.
Werth, Margaret, “Heterogeneity, the City, and Cinema in Alberto Cavalcanti’s ‘Rien que les heures’,” Art History 36, 5 (November 2013): 1018–41.
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