Together with his brother in law Léon Moussinac, Jean Lods (1903–74) participated in 1928 in the foundation of the ciné-club les Amis de Spartacus, which screened several films of the Soviet avant-garde. One of the notorious members of Les Amis de Spartacus was the Vicomte de Noailles, who would finance films by Man Ray, Buñuel, and Cocteau in the late 1920s and early 1930s. In that same period, the viscount was to join with Étienne de Beaumont in financing the first films by Jean Lods, too, particularly Vingt-quatre heures en trente minutes (1929) and Champs-Élysées (1929), which are both dedicated to Paris. The embankments of Paris also feature in La Vie d’un fleuve: la Seine (1931), which follows the course of the river from its source up to the sea. Made in close collaboration with Boris Kaufman (1906–80), who acted as cameraman and/or co-director, and would go on to shoot Jean Vigo’s À propos de Nice (1930) and L’Atalante (1934), these three films were described as “avant-garde films that walked the line between impressionism and documentary.”
As its title indicates, Vingt-quatre heures en trente minutes compresses a day’s life in the city of Paris into half an hour of film. In the wake of Cavalcanti’s Rien que les heures and Ruttmann’s Berlin, representing life in a city within the time span of a single day became a recurrent formula in city symphonies. Lods and Kaufman made this the very principle of their film, which was initially released as Aujourd’hui (Today) in the spring of 1929. On 15 May 1929, Cinéa reported, “Lods and Kaufman are finishing their film Aujourd’hui,” which consists of
600 meter of film representing the essential and succeeding stages of a single day in a week… . Their aim is to reconstruct the day, by showing the elements of life, their intensity, and to assemble the 24 hours in a thirty-minutes projection.
In the same week, in La Semaine à Paris, Claude Fayard praised the film he had seen at a private screening as “a revelation” and a perfect film in both its “format and realization.” “Everything is logical, measured, wanted in this succession of images. And the search for certain techniques, the curiosity of certain camera angles insures its logic.” He describes the film as “a poem on the monotony of labor days that resemble each other.” Fayard further argues, “The only flaw of this film is its imprecise title.”
Perhaps taking their cue from such remarks, Lods and Kaufman rereleased the film (altered or unaltered) with its new title, Vingt-quatre heures en trente minutes, which was welcomed by the French press in October 1929, when it was playing at Vieux-Colombier. In Le Correspondant, Jean Morienval called the filmmakers “ingenious” and he stated that their film adds to the conquests of cinema as it makes us to see everyday things in a new perspective when they are shown on the screen. Vingt-quatre heures en trente minutes was also praised by Léon Moussinac, calling the film “the first scientific essay realized in France apart from some fragments in the works by Gance.” Moussinac particularly appreciated that
the filmmakers have limited their ambitions. They have not tried to reveal ‘the spirit of the metropolis’ as Walter Ruttmann attempted to do, but only that which is maybe tragic in the banality of everyday gestures in the mundane labor of the masses.
Moussinac further praised the rawness of the film and the filmmakers’ discipline in both their shots and montage.
However, not everybody was enthusiastic about the film. Attacking Moussinac directly, Robert Desnos (in Documents in December 1929) dismissed Vingt-quatre heures en trente minutes as a form of pseudo-avant-garde and as “a pitiful imitation of the original films of Sauvage and Cavalcanti.”
Steven Jacobs
further reading
Desnos, Robert, “Avant-Garde Cinema” (1929), in Richard Abel (ed.), French Film Theory and Criticism 1907–1939: A History/Anthology, Vol. 1 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 429–32.
Fayard, Claude, “Une révélation: ‘Aujourd’hui’ de Lods et Kaufman,” La semaine à Paris (17 May 1929): 37–8.
Moussinac, Léon, “Sur trois films dits ‘d’avant-garde’,” L’Humanité (6 October 1929): 4.
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