Jean Vigo didn’t live very long. He was 29 when he died from TB in 1934. His films comprise one feature (L’Atalante), and three shorts. But two of these movies are masterpieces, and everything is fired with imagination, zeal, and wit.
Vigo was only 12 when his father — an anarchist agitator — was murdered in police custody. Inspired by his idealism, he set out to make revolutionary films — first with the satiric documentary A Propos de Nice (1930), then with the anarchic boarding school memoir, Zéro de Conduite — an inspiration for Lindsay Anderson’s If. (The third short, Taris, is a nine minute expermental fragment.)
These first films are angry and polemical, but liberating in their fervour for the transformative power of cinema. Vigo didn’t incite the revolution he hoped for, but his innovative art would inspire future generations of filmmakers. His most enduring testament is L’Atalante, completed the year of his death, and evidence of a more tender, compassionate and lyrical sensibility. A love story, about newlyweds working on a coal barge on the Seine, this is rated one of the ten best films ever made by many critics.
Sunday’s Pantheon screening will feature a 15-minute introduction by a local film scholar and be followed by an audience talkback.
Vigo is Cinema incarnate in one man.
Henri Langois
Vigo was one of the very few real originals who have ever worked in film. Nobody has . . . excelled his vivid communication of the animal emotions . . . nor have I found, except in the best work of a few masters, a flexibility, richness, and purity of creative passion to equal his.
James Agee, The Nation (1947)
Jean Vigo
Jean Dasté, Dita Parlo, Michel Simon, Louis Lefebvre, Gilles Margaritis, Fanny Clar
France
1934
In French with English subtitles
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Credits
Screenwriter
Jean Vigo, Albert Riéra
Cinematography
Boris Kaufman, Louis Berger, Jean-Paul Alphen
Editor
Louis Chavance
Original Music
Maurice Jaubert
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Image: © Disney, 1940
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