CAVALCANTI (1926)
Directed by Alberto Cavalcanti
52 minutes
One of the very first "city symphonies," this film interweaves documentary, experimental, and narrative elements that together provide vivid images of Paris in the mid-1920s. The Brazilian-born Cavalcanti was at the time a central figure of the French avant-garde, but his fascinating career would later find him making pioneering documentaries for John Grierson's GPO Film Unit in the UK in the 1930s, dramas, noirs, and musicals for Ealing Studios throughout the 1940s, and finally a wide array of films in Brazil, East Germany, France, and Israel in the years before his death in 1982.