Rien que les heures shows one day in Paris: life as it was in the twenties of the last century. Alberto Cavalcanti’s 45-minute experimental debut film is considered the first official city symphony, a subgenre of the avant-garde movement about life in big cities. With his film, the Brazilian filmmaker not only shows the large crowds and interesting architecture of Paris, he also has an eye for the loneliness and class differences between rich and poor.

More than in Dziga Vertov’s classic Man with a Movie Camera (1929), Cavalcanti focuses on the individual, giving the film a melodramatic and narrative character. Cavalcanti would later also collaborate on Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt, another classic within the city symphony genre.