The Lincoln Library Film Society presents “Sailor’s Song: The Films of Alberto Cavalcanti,” a four-part retrospective that kicks off tonight (August 6) in the Tarbell Room at 7 p.m. with three short films and two classic British documentaries.
The Brazilian-born and Swiss-educated Cavalcanti was a cosmopolitan filmmaker, spending half a century as a creative force at the forefront of several successive film movements in both Europe and South America. After studying architecture and interior design, he worked on set decoration for the films of French avant garde director Marcel L’Herbier. He and filmmaker Claude Autant-Lara made intensely modernist visual designs for L’Herbier’s films, and quickly distinguished them at the center of a very vital artistic scene in 1920s Paris.
It was there that Cavalcanti began directing his own films, merging experimental techniques with the growing form of the documentary film. Then in the 1930s, he left France for Britain, where John Grierson and a team of dedicated cinéastes were making ground-breaking documentaries in the form of the government’s educational films.
Following an extended stay in England, Cavalcanti returned to his home country, where he continued directing, and making films in the European realist tradition that would inspire the Brazilian “new wave” (seen in the retrospective we held back in May/June of this year). Blacklisted as a communist in the 50s, he went on to spend the last three decades of his life continuing to make films, in Italy, Israel and East Germany.
Influential and controversial wherever he went, Cavalcanti left his mark on a number of cinematic traditions. We’ll be screening a selection of his films of varying shades, from France, Britain, and Brazil, surveying his contribution to documentary and fiction forms alike.
The Cavalcanti series continues on August 13, 20 and 27—see details in the Lincoln Squirrel’s calendar section.
Tonight’s films:
Rien que les Heures (Nothing but Time)
France / 1926 / silent / 45 minutes
Cavalcanti’s first credit as director, the experimental “city symphony” Nothing but Time, has been cited as an inspiration for Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927) and Dziga Vertov’s Man With a Movie Camera (1929). The fashionable districts and grimy alleyways of the place, light and dark, celebration and death reel out over the course of the film, which is full of inventive imagery, playful visual rhymes, and an unmoored sense of freedom. A day in the life of Paris, condensed into 45 minutes!
Night Mail
UK / 1936 / English / 24 minutes
The Song of Ceylon
UK / 1934 / English / 38 minutes
In 1934, Cavalcanti left Paris at the invitation of documentary film producer John Grierson’s film unit, a government-sponsored subsidiary of the General Post Office. He remained in Britain for the next 15 years, beginning with nonfiction and then, during the war, transitioning to making feature films for Ealing Studios.
We’ll watch two landmark documentaries from the 1930s, both directed by Basil Wright. Cavalcanti contributed his brilliant collage aesthetic as sound editor for Night Mail, which boasts a script by W.H. Auden and a score by Benjamin Britten. Next is one of the most celebrated films to come from the G.P.O., The Song of Ceylon, a film done for the Tea Propaganda Board that stands out with sensuous cinematography, cutting-edge editing, and again, sophisticated sound design by Cavalcanti.