Corazones del tiempo
1934 · 8m · Estados Unidos
Directed by Orson Welles, William Vance
Genres: comedy, experimental, surrealism
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, surreal
Orson Welles's first film is an experimental, surrealist short in which Death and an old woman on a bell enact repetitive, fractured movements in a parody of early Cocteau and German expressionism.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Welles and Vance's parodic Death-and-crone routine should be insufferable—a joke about jokes—but the fact that it *is* insufferable, deliberately so, makes it weirdly necessary; most filmmakers don't have the arrogance to waste 8 minutes on something this deliberately difficult.
A document of genuine formal courage: Welles already understood the grammar of German Expressionism and early Surrealism well enough to deconstruct it, and the repetitive fracturing of movement reads as deliberate critique of those traditions' own aesthetics—this is cinema thinking about cinema.
The editing decision to loop and fragment the movements rather than let them play naturally is what makes this work; it's the constraint that transforms what could be a student exercise into something genuinely unsettling, the kind of formal choice that costs nothing but instinct.