Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Rien que les heures

FR 1926. PC: Néo-Films. P: Pierre Braunberger. D+ED: Alberto Cavalcanti. Ass D: André Cerf. SC: Alberto Cavalcanti, André Cerf. DP: James Rogers. AD: Mirowitch. Perf: Blanche Bernis, Nina Chouvalowa, Philippe Hériat, Clifford McLagen, André Cerf. A b&w Filmarkivet / Svenska Filminstitutet print, 920 m /20 fps/ 40 min, with Dutch intertitles, with e-subtitles in Finnish by Lena Talvio, viewed at Cinema Orion, Helsinki, 30 Nov 2010.

Revisited Alberto Cavalcanti's Ur-city-symphony which I saw last month in Pordenone. There is a joy of cinema in this film, of mobilizing all cinema's means of expression to create a new and original vision of urban poetry. The monuments and the traffic. The motor cars and the donkey carts. The transformations in superimpositions. The visions of the great modern painters in a montage sequence. The infinity of viewpoints. The streetwalker as a bird of prey. The urban waste. The devastating poverty. The clochards. The draw of the cards spells death. The fairground. The subjective camera in the merry-go-round: the acceleration of the movement until the image becomes abstract. A satisfactory visual quality in this black and white print.

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