Cavalcanti en el París errante

Abstract

Paris was for a long time the great modern metropolis. In the twenties of the last century it was also the center of the artistic and intellectual avant-gardes. Walter Benjamin, Baudelaire and Gyula Halász (Brassaï) wandered through its streets, among others, who found in the pleasure of wandering the city an experience and a form of aesthetic exploration, which also discovered the Dada movement at the time. In that pleasure, perhaps without knowing it, they continued with a tradition that Gérald de Nerval had already begun in the nineteenth century in what he called “promenade nocturne”. This same idea is perceived in the film Rien que les heures (1926) by Alberto Cavalcanti. There are shown, from the perspective of the immigrant, two cities that are opposed, but that are necessarily inseparable, since the two are inevitably Paris. On the one hand, there is the modern and glamorous Paris that sits on firm ground, on the arivière of the Seine, as a perfect landscape for boulevards, large avenues and cafes where dandies still accompanied by beautiful mesdemoiselles. But, on the other, there is another that lived on the sidelines and where the missing chiffonniers or the charming flâneur, who also sang Baudelaire, also wandered. These characters, along with prostitutes, bandits et marins, among many others, inhabited these streets that formed a world in which they lived, wandered, fought, fell in love and died, perhaps under the unaided gaze of the normalized metropolis, but always condescending or, if you like, alcahueta of the other city that I call here: the wandering Paris.