Jean Vigo

Tuberculosis very soon cut the stem of this exceptional artist. Jean Vigo was 29 years old and only 5 of them were dedicated fully to the cinema. Enough to leave indelible images like those of the pillow fight, with the feathers floating in the air, in Zero in conduct ; or those of Michel Simon in the waters of the river, looking for his wife From him Dita Parlo , love lost in L’Atalante because of her, because of her great fault, because of her very great fault. Early death and libertarian ideas fed the romantic image of Vigo, forged his legend.

The filmmaker’s life was intense, with almost soap opera circumstances. His father, Eugène Bonaventure de Vigo, was a militant anarchist with the journalistic pseudonym Miguel Almereyda. Accused of espionage, he was found hanged in his cell in 1917. Jean was only 12 years old and his mother, also an activist, did not take care of him. Entrusted to a professional photographer relative, he goes through schools and boarding schools, a negative experience that influences his ideas about authority, embodied in Zero in Conduct . He studies philosophy at the Sorbonne, and wants to rehabilitate the figure of his father using the cinema. His fragile health forces him to frequent stays in sanatoriums. In one he meets Lydou, whom he marries in Nice in 1929; they will have a daughter. That year he meets the operator of all his films, Boris Kaufman .. His first work, About Nice , is a fresco of the city that unites images of people and places with visual talent and youthful impetus, consciously swinging between the moving and the grotesque, as a claim to the revolutionary attitude that he advocates. Admirer of Luis Buñuel , he already recognizes his surreal touch. In addition to promoting the film club ‘Les amis du cinéma’, he writes a presentation of his film, ‘Towards a social cinema’, a clear and radical manifesto of what he intends: “To move towards social cinema would simply be allowing yourself to say something and wake up, in those ladies and gentlemen who come to the cinema to digest, echoes that are not belches”.

Swimming, by Jean Taris or, simply, Taris (1931) is in his hands something more than a documentary about a champion and his lessons to move in the water. His unusual aquatic images will be a useful experience for L’Atalante . Subversive and maverick, reckoning with her past, Zero in conduct(1933) is prohibited by censorship. His drawing of urchins rebelling against his ridiculous superiors at a boarding school exudes a corrosive humor and social criticism that was deemed intolerable. Thus, he does not miss his resignation to convert the story of a convict friend of the Vigo family, who had to play himself, into celluloid. He preferred to occupy himself with an innocuous-looking story, the ups and downs of a young newlywed couple living on a river barge, their minor marital differences happily resolved. L’Atalante(1934) thus stands as the masterpiece of Vigo, who frees himself from the confinement of a banal plot, to paint life with vigorous strokes. Passionate love, jealousy, the temptation of escapism… We understand Uncle Jules displaying his capacity as a seducer of yesteryear, or the convulsed faces in dreams of the separated spouses Jean and Juliette, who unconsciously express their spiritual and physical need for each other. Seriously ill, Vigo approved a first cut of the film, with indications to improve it. But his death and the fears of the distributors before a ‘different’ film led to its mutilation, the change of title and the suppression of the great music by Maurice Jaubert. The film would suffer many vicissitudes before Gaumont, in 1990, promoted its recovery according to the director’s wishes. Today we can finally admire it as a prodigious piece.