Alberto Cavalcanti
Alberto de Almeida Cavalcanti ( born February 6, 1897 in Rio de Janeiro; † August 23, 1982 in Paris) was a Brazilian film director and film producer. He worked mainly in Europe.
Life and work
Cavalcanti was born the son of a mathematician and was considered above average intelligence. At the age of 15 he began a law degree at the University, but this broke after a short time again. His father sent him to Geneva, where he decided to study architecture. At 18, he moved to Paris and worked for an architect, later for an interior designer. After a visit to Brazil, he took a position in the Brazilian consulate in Liverpool.
Cavalcanti was in contact with the avant-garde French film director Marcel L' Herbier. This offered him to work as a production designer for him. Cavalcanti left his job in the early 1920s at the consulate and went back to France. He was involved among other things, the production of L' Herbiers films L' Inhumaine (1924 ) and Mattia Pascal (1925 ). In 1926 he directed his first film, the experimental documentary Rien Que les Heures a daily routine in Paris. In the following year, he worked with Walter Ruttmann on a similar project (Berlin: Symphony of a Great City) together. With the beginning of the sound era, he was employed by the French studios Paramount and experimented with the possibilities of sound. He gave the job but in 1933 due to artistic differences again and went to England.
From 1934 worked Alberto Cavalcanti for John Grierson's documentary filmmaker group of the GPO Film Unit. There he worked for a period of 7 years in numerous documentary films as a sound engineer, but also as a director and consultant. In 1937 he was briefly for the Grierson migrated to Canada interim chief of the studio. The permanent acquisition of the item was denied him, since he was not willing to accept British citizenship. Cavalcanti left the GPO Film Unit and joined in 1940 the Ealing Studios of producer Michael Balcon, and was employed there in various capacities. He began with the production of propaganda films such as Cowardly Caesar (1941 ) - a compilation film, the scenes of Mussolini with the aim of denigrating and ridiculing strung together. To Cavalcanti's most important works in Ealing include the 1942 are propaganda film Went the Day Well?, Dead of Night ( Dead of Night ) ( 1945) and Nicholas Nickleby (1947). Cavalcanti left Ealing over money disputes, and went to three other film control rooms in the UK in 1950 back to Brazil.
There he worked as a producer for the Companhia Cinematográfica Veracruz, which eventually went bankrupt. A communist branded hard he could find work in Brazil and went mid-1950s back to Europe. In 1955, he led the Vienna Rose Hill movie studios directed the film adaptation of Bertolt Brecht's Puntila and his Man Matti. He worked in the 1960s and 1970s as traveling around a director in several European countries.