What a lot Jean Vigo still inspires! 'Genius brings full life to others.'
Jean Vigo lived a mere 29 years, made a mere four films (only one of them feature-length), and yet, I think, he’s ‘one of the great revelations in cinema.’
And how hardy was the Frenchman! A Spaniard in the works! Check out this quip by Jean on his death-bed.
Lydou Lozinska sat beside him. She was Jean’s wife and creative partner. She too had tuberculosis in 1934. The couple had just finished their masterpieces “Zero for Conduct” and “L’Atalante”.
Lydou told friends about Jean: “His life is hanging by a threat.”
“A cable!” he interjected.
Jean was the kind of person who made colleagues thankful and wondrous.
His producer, Jacques Louis-Nounez, said: “My immediate impression was of a deeply idealistic and extremely sensitive man. He was also a man of great subtlety.”
Jean Daste, Vigo’s leading actor in “Zero …” and “L’Atalante”, said: “He made jokes all the time. Spending a day with him was both wonderful and grueling […] He was such a vivacious person.”
Another friend remembered the actor and Jean : “He and Daste came to my mother’s house dressed as old ladies.”
I first wrote 'Jean Vigo' for the website, puppetgov.com, of another splendid iconoclast, Bill Jablonski. A slightly different version is on the WeAreRevolutions website in its Flipping the Script blog..
Here we go in 2023!
"There are stranger things than playing a record with your finger"
Jean Vigo, director and screenwriter, is one of the great revelations in cinema.
Jean Vigo worked on films for a mere five years, 1930 to 1934, and completed but four, only one of them feature-length, and yet he indelibly expanded the possibilities of film. His career and output have no parallel.
For one thing, Jean Vigo left us passages on film that are unmatched in their vigor--passages of ambiguity, empathy, humor, imagery, lyricism, tenderness, ... sheer fun and magic.
Jean Vigo was the issue of rebel France and rebel Spain. He combines aspects of Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Balzac, Cervantes, Velasquez, Picasso, and Bunuel. He has a novelist's perspicacity, a poet's whimsy, and a painter's touch. He has the quickness of fellow-feeling that D. H. Lawrence named as distinguishing genius.
Jean Vigo was empowered by a wife of comparable sensitivity, Elisabeth "Lydou" Lozinska, and friends who were his peers in that admirable generation of iconoclasts who were taught by the horrors of World War I.
Jean Vigo was born in 1905 to Emily Clero and a writer and newspaper-publisher whose given name was Eugeni Boneventura de Vigo i Salles and whose chosen name was Miguel Almereyda.
That chosen surname can be translated as "there's the shit". Miguel Almereyda was both Catalan and Anarchist. In 1917 he was arrested for opposing the Leon Daudet-fronted prolongation of France's part in World War I. Almereyda asserted that the War's further slaughter of millions was principally for bankers' profit of billions. He died in Fresnes Prison, strangled by a shoe-lace, August 14, 2017, when Jean was 12. Authorities judged his death a 'suicide.' His son had to leave Paris and go to school under the alias Jean Sales. Five years later Jean reunited with his mother, Emily. In 1926, then 21, he met the 19-year-old Elisabeth "Lydou" Lozinska, daughter of a Polish industrialist, at the Font-Romeu sanatorium nearby France's border with Spain.
Both young people were tubercular and both inclined to jumping into water. They were together and tempestuous thereafter. They married in 1929 and had a daughter, Luce, in 1931. They infused and inspired each other. Lydou was Jean's personal assistant and closest partner on his last two and most celebrated films, "Zero du Conduite" ("Zero for Conduct") and "L'Atalante", the name of a river barge on which its newly married skipper and country wife travel to Paris.
About the Films
"A propos de Nice"
A 25-minute documentary, co-directed in 1930 by Vigo and Boris Kaufman (brother of Dziga Vertov and later cinematographer for Elia Kazan's "On the Waterfront" and Sidney Lumet's "The Pawnbroker").
Aerial views of the Mediterranean city, Nice. Rooftops a patchwork of housing. Their assembly dates from the Crusades and their blocks of boxes are now a modern grid.
Who lives here? Who ARE they here? What a surprising variety!
Washerwomen. Cart-pullers. Cart-pushers. Hawkers of newspapers, hawkers of scarves. Bicyclists. And bourgeoisie at their leisure.
So many who can afford to repeat themselves at rest. Men asleep under derbies in their Promenade des Anglais chairs. Men squinting at newspapers over their coffee. And ladies lounging with their ankles crossed. So many swollen ankles crossed! Inside so many stockings! And that lady in would-be Haute Couture of successive dresses and pearls, her legs crossed under a presumable umbrella. Now she's nude, bare-breasted, on screen, 1930 ... but she's no less inert in her pose.
The recreations of affluence on vacation. Sailboats vying between buoys on their race- course. Race-cars digging round corners. Red carpets rolling out in front of Hotels.
But--life! Always life spontaneously emerges among those who must work with their hands for their Francs. Swimmers stroke out from the desolate beach. Someone essays and carries a tune. Carnival is coming, too. Carnival for escape and freedom, creativity and vivacity. Parades! Masks! Papier-maché caricatures big as Owens Valley boulders. Papier-maché more impressive than any Hotel's neo-Roman facade! Where do they giant caricatures and statements come from? How are they made? People somehow make them and parade with them, proud and smiling.
Then the dancers! The dancers Vigo and Kaufman bring us in 'A propos de Nice'! Kicking their legs, laughing and raising their skirts for the camera beneath them, the coterie of partying ladies we meet. They won't stop! Why should they? They're having fun! Now is their time and today is their stage and the music (unheard in the originally silent 'A propos ...") must be very, very good and fun!
Carnival, and faces we've seen earlier in the autumnal bourgeois slumber of Nice re-emerge. Faces of the old and the working-class receive the greatest attention and tenderness in "A propos ..." Singular face! Faces misshapen and faces ravaged. Faces whose topography can come only from profound experience and inextinguishable humor. That smallish, elderly dumpling/temtpress from Grimm, so proud and gay, displaying and yet keeping her secrets, aboard her float--what a surprise she, too, is!
And our view sweeps over the beach and its rocks. Freedom! People who work with their hands will find their freedom.
"Taris"
A 9-minute work-for-hire about the French Olympic swimmer.
Jean Taris is a true amateur, a natural athlete, and an uneasy actor outside his element of water.
Jean Taris demonstrates his skills. The Crawl, the Backstroke, the Racers' dive ... How efficient, how powerful, how fluid and HIMSELF, Jean Taris is in water. And the camera that tracks him underwater is sympathetic, symbiotic, empowered. Jean Vigo takes delight in Jean Taris' grace and power. Taris swiftly evolves into his most complete self. He cuts through water like his body is a blade or a painter's brush-strokes.... Freedom! Freedom through passion and effort fulfilled. Freedom through doing the thing one loves.
The athlete dives, swims, and becomes artist.
"Zero de Conduite"
A 44-minute "medium-length" feature that was Vigo's first partnership with actor Jean Daste and producer Jacques Louis-Nounez.
A story the artist Jean Vigo has lived to tell. His life-story, in part. A setting and cast of characters familiar to the filmmaker, allowing him breakthroughs. The realization of skills and gifts through fiction's opening for personal truths. A ripening and maturation of rebellion through returning to adolescence.
The story of "Zero for Conduit" is of four in boarding-school--Bruel, Caussat, Colin and Tabard. They're aged about 14 to 10. They insist on insubordination. Each is individual and hence imperfect. Caussat is guffawing, Bruel is suspicious, Colin is tentative, and Tabard is "a sissy."
Their particular afflictions and targets are their Headmaster, his Housemaster, and their Monitors. "You realize the enormity of our moral responsibility," the Headmaster, a bearded midget in a coal-black suit, tells his Housemaster. These servants of authority are quick to deliver "Zero de conduite" (Zero for conduct), of course, and the consequent punishments.
One teacher, however, Huguet (played by Jean Daste), is independent like the student rebels would be. He walks on his hands for sport. He strolls around town as he pleases. Because he leads without force except that of his personality and his own choices, Huguet attracts the students' alliance.
The four plot insurrection for Commemoration Day. Their rebellion is of course a contagion as it gains strength. Food-fights erupt. Bread flies. Soup flies. Pillow-fights erupt. Feathers fly like a parade's confetti.
The early chaos of the boarders' pillow-fight becomes a triumphal procession. One ring-leader springs from a hand-stand into the chair made by his peers' arms. The youth's "mess" is like an improbably routiers' peaceable march to seize a city as doves as doves flock in their release flight. The floating exaggerations of Vigo's direction and Kaufman's camera accent the scene's suggestions.
Tabard, the "sissy", has proved himself by now. Pressed by the bearded, midget-tall Headmaster to apologize before his "peers", he declares with plain-spoken pungency: "I tell you: You are full of shit!"
Tabard reads the rebels' manifesto. "War is declared! Down with monitors and punishment! ... Hoist our flag on the school roof! We'll bombard them with rotten old books, dirty tin cans, smelly boots, and all the ammo piled in the attic.... Onward!"
Revolt rains down on the official Commemoration. Books and boots ARE thrown from the tile rooftop. Those in top hats take cover and then disperse in a rout. The court, the field, below, belongs to the young, insubordinate, and celebrant. Even the Housemaster known as "Beanpole", ineffable hypocrite and humorously sneaking thief, smiles .
Freedom! The madcap rules! Energy and Liberté above all. "Zero de Conduite" / 'Zero for Conduct"..." becomes a model for "Breathless" and Beatles and remains a model for evolution through spontaneous transgression of rigid nonsense, transgression meant to grow a whole.
"L'Atalante"
"L'Atalante" is Jean Vigo's one feature-length movie and his complete masterpiece.
Vigo made "L'Atalante" it in the Winter of 1933-1934 on the heels of a disaster for "Zero du Conduite."
Jean Daste recalled how the earlier film was received at its premiere before distributors and a select public in Paris. "People couldn't take it. They were horrified--there was shouting and booing." Pierre Prevert remembered: "People were shouting: 'This is shameful! Scandalous!' "
Vigo's producer, Jacques Louis-Nounez, however, stuck with him for the next project. "L'Atalante" was to be more conventional and commercial. It was adapted from a scenario by Jean Guinee. The story was: barge-skipper and village-girl marry--separate in their marriage's initial tumult as he continues to work along the Seine--and after the split romantically reunite.
Nounez summarized the source as "this indisputably syrupy script." Vigo responded to his initial reading: 'What the hell do I do with this? This is Sunday-School fare. There's nothing there."
Yet an entirely different world, grounded in realism but spinning into magic, was created in the making of "L'Atalante". First Vigo and co-screenwriter Albert Riera came up with a Mate, Pere Jules, to accompany the barge's Skipper, Jean.
Pere Jules has banged round the world since the late 19th century, picking up curios in Caracas, Singapore, Papeete. A grizzled, libidinous salt and sot. An accordion-player as apt to dance or lick his puffy lips as he is to repeat his interrogative sentences. "The skipper jumped in the water? He jumped in the water?".
Pere Jules attracted the great actor Michel Simon, already a title character for Jean Renoir, to the role.
Further--and this magic carries throughout Vigo's cinematic depictions of conventional realities--the movie transforms the newlyweds' marriage into something as fluid and surprising as turns of vibrant weather or vibrant music. The 1930s of blackened bridges and canal-cranes is so wholly evoked by Vigo and Kaufman--so alive with sounds and smoke and vapors--that the couple, Juliette and Jean, and the viewer are immersed within it. Verisimilitude of mundane detail, poetic evocation, and emotional truth blend into a whole of its own time and place. Maurice Jaubert's exact and sympathetic score assists in the entry and envelopment.
The newlyweds are played by Jean Daste and Dita Parlo. Their vivacity calls up pictures of Vigo and Lydou. The bristly but milky difficulty of a couple's early love is shown with boldness, nuance and affection. The uncertainty! The pull-and-push of attraction-and-aversion! The resistance to surrender!
Juliette's eyes wander. Jean broods over his drink. Juliette leans into another's embrace. Jean jerks them apart. Separated, they long for each other. They're as if demented in their stupor and their seeking. Juliette drifts along, staring into display-windows. Jean sticks his head into a bucket of water and then dives into the freezing Seine. "The skipper has jumped into the water? The skipper has jumped into the water?"
Dots like a gigantically spackling disease play over each lover as he or she tosses and turns and reaches for a lost embrace in his or her separate beds. Reunited through Pere Jules' intuition, they poise for a moment , then tumble to the barge's floor. Just like young love.
"L"Atalante" is also rare unto supreme in its depiction of how blue-collar working-men get along. The japing and the joking. The grunts and glances instead of words. The inarticulateness that builds and leads to sudden, dramatic action. The acceptance of violence that can be passed over as an expression of inarticulateness not worthy of violent response. The affection that abides through knowing how the other feels and who (the quality of person) the other is.
"Crazy as a loon," Pere Jules says about the skipper, Jean, after (1) a cat thrown by the barge's "Kid" mate breaks up Pere Jules' and the skipper's game of checkers and (2) Jean dunks his head in the bucket.
"L'Atalante" follows Jean's and Juliette's tumble into each other's arms on the barge's floor with another aerial view. The movie concludes as our POV advances over river's unending, undulant ribbon of length and
Jaubert's score sashays back and forth among strings
Freedom! Ah, but freedom preceded by resurgent love and freedom bound by eternities of nature.
About Jean Vigo
The Criterion Collection has a two-DVD edition, titled "The Complete Jean Vigo". The Criterion DVD 1 offers Jean Vigo's four films in restored versions. Its DVD 2 offers a 98-minute documentary that Jacques Rozier directed for French TV in 1964, a dialogue between interviewer Eric Rohmer and Francois Truffaut 1968, and reminiscences of Vigo and the making of "L'Atalante".
Jacques Rozier's documentary is the source of most of the quotes below. Vigo's friends convey humor and fellow-feeling comparable to the qualities they recount about him. They come across as people with whom one could pleasurably talk and drink for hours.
Their memories echo one another. "I loved the mischievous twinkle in his eyes. So full of life." "A great prankster." "A great sense of humor." "He loved having fun." "He and Daste came to my mother's house dressed as old ladies."
Jean Daste: 'He made jokes all the time. Spending a day with him was both wonderful and grueling, even a few weeks before his death. He was such a vivacious person."
Friends also speak of a tenderness in Jean Vigo that could be rigorous and bracing. "He was very tender, even if it was a cruel tenderness at times." "He made an extraordinary impression on you of vitality, tenderness, and kindness, but also of cruelty toward whatever he disliked." "He was full of life and tenderness for others. Very tolerant of others' ideas."
Jacques Louis-Nounez, producer of "Zero ..." and "L"Atalante", recalled: "My immediate impression was of a deeply idealistic and extremely sensitive man. He was also a man of great subtlety. He made a remarkable impression on you, something not many people do."
Michel Simon (Pere Jules) recognized a brother iconoclast: "We realized the moment we met that we felt the same way about filmmaking, and that our views were in complete opposition to how 'upstanding citizens' thought cinema should be."
Dita Parlo (Juliette) appears to wistfully treasure associations: "He was charming and had exceptional charisma, a natural quality you just can't explain.... I got the feeling that Vigo was always open to surprises."
Friends speak of how Vigo refused to be morbid during the months he was bed-ridden, attended by his also tubercular wife Lydou, after "L'Atalante".
"His wife would say, "His life is hanging by a thread", and Jean would say, "A cable!" His black humor was extraordinary."
Gilles Margaritis (Camelot, the showman/peddler in "LAtalante"): "That's what kept him going: his spirit."
Charles Goldblatt: "He had such vitality that he couldn't accept he was dying."
Critics and Resources
Decades after 1934, critics and fellow artists regarded Vigo with reciprocal wonder and esteem.
James Agee wrote in The Nation, 1947, following the dual debut in New York City of "Zero de Conduite" and "L'Atalante": 'Nobody has approached Vigo's adroitness in handling reality, consciousness, and time on film (in Zero), or has excelled his vivid communication of the animal emotions, the senses, the inanimate world, and their interplay (in LAtalante); nor have I found, except in the best work of the few masters, a flexibility, richness, and purity of creative passion to equal his in both these films.'
Francois Truffaut said in 1970: "What was Vigo's secret? Probably he lived more intensely than most of us.... Vigo seems to have worked continuously in this state of [intense, fevered, tremendous, sublime] trance, without ever losing his clearheadedness."
Jonathan Rosenbaum reviewed a more restored "L'Atalante" for the Chicago Reader in 1991 and gave a more comprehensive perspective: 'But the fact that Vigo still remains one of the key figures in the history of cinema based on a total oeuvre that runs less than three hours gives some hint of how indestructible his talent remains.'
Finally, we look back on the work with gladness that its improbable magic came to be.
Pere Jules explains to the Kid in "L'Atalante" the reason behind one of his fancies: "There are stranger things than playing a record with your finger."
Belief again makes the impossible possible. Don Quixote, Ché, Uncle Toby, Marie Laveau, Erzulie ... And we understand better what Pere Jules’ and Jean Vigos’ jokes means.
Resources
"The Complete Jean Vigo", Criterium Collection two-DVD edition, with revealing articles by Michael Almereyda. Robert Politos, B. Kite, and Luc Sante.
Jean Vigo website, http://recollectionbooks.com/siml/library/vigo.html
Maximilian le Cain's essay at http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2002/great-directors/vigo/
Review of "L'Atalante" by Jonathan Rosenbaum, http://www.jonathanrosenbaum.com/?m=199103
Yes, Andy--Jean Vigo! Fun and artistry together with a great sympathy for working-people!
Thanks DP. Interesting!