It was a great loss to the French film industry when director Jean Vigo left the earth in 1934 at the age of twenty-nine. Vigo was unarguably one of France's most talented and promising young filmmakers whose entire canon amounted to two documentaries and two longer fictional works.
After a concentrated study of the South of France, a A Propos de Nice (1930) a late silent entry which fuses documentary and surrealist elements, and a film short that focuses on the champion swimmer Jean Taris, Taris (1931), Vigo produced the two films on which the reputation principally rests. Both were dogged by misfortune. The 47 minute Nought for Behavior (Zero de conduite,1933), an abstract study on par with the early works of Eisenstein, of boarding-school life, would be banned by the French censor board until the year 1945, and the feature-length standalone L'Atalante (The Atlanta,1934) was reedited and re-dubbed by a team of producers while Vigo himself lay dying.
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| Them Katzenjammer Kids have nothing on us - bedlam in the bedroom in Zero de conduite (1933) |
Through both films runs an inimitable vein of poetry. The world of childhood has seldom been so accurately depicted as it was in Nought for Behavior and the combination of L'Atalante of realistically detailed barge life replete with larger-than-life itself elements (such as the figure of the mate, astutely played by Swiss actor Michael Simon (1895-1975) is a successful concoction of fantasy of reality.