|
The most acclaimed (and sentimental) film in Jean Vigo's short career. L'Atalante is the name of the barge owned by Jean (Jean Daste), who marries the lovely Juliette (Dita Parlo) at the film's beginning. Juliette comes to live aboard the barge, for Jean makes his living on the Seine. The arrival of a woman on board disrupts the small crew, but they do their best to make her welcome. The solitude and boredom soon take their toll on Juliette, so Jean brings her ashore for a night at a cafe in Paris. He becomes jealous of a flirtation between Juliette and a peddler, and when she leaves the ship again later, Jean casts off from the port. This dark love story is also peppered with hallucinations and unusual camerawork. A restored version was made available in 1990. A Propos de Nice was the first of pantheon French filmmaker Jean Vigo's four feature films. According to Vigo's legions of admirers, the film represents Life as the director truly perceived it: Not the steadily flowing river that many assume Life to be, but a dizzying succession of vaguely related, seconds-lasting vignettes. Essentially a satiric documentary of Nice, where the tubercular Vigo had been compelled to settle for his health, the film resembles the montage-like "visual symphonies" of Russian director Dziga Vertov. Indeed, Vertov's brother, Boris Kaufmann, served as cinematographer on this and two subsequent Vigo productions. The delicate blend between realism and surrealism in A Propos de Nice would later be melded with Vigo's sense of poetry in his future masterpieces Zero de conduite and L'Atalante.The shortest of French filmmaker Jean Vigo's two feature-length films, Zero for Conduct (Zero de Conduite) is also arguably his most influential. The overtly autobiographical plotline takes place at a painfully strict boys' boarding school, presided over by such petit-bourgeous tyrants as a discipline-dispensing dwarf. The students revolt against the monotony of their daily routine by erupting into a outsized pillow fight. Their final assault occurs during a prim-and-proper school ceremony, wherein the headmasters are bombarded with fruit. Like all of Vigo's works, Zero for Conduct was greeted with outrage by the "right" people. Thanks to pressure from civic and educational groups, this exhilaratingly anarchistic film was banned from public exhibition until 1945. Among the future filmmakers influenced by Zero for Conduct was Lindsay Anderson, who unabashedly used the Vigo film as blueprint for his own anti-establishment exercise If.
Condition:NEW. Brand New Factory Sealed
Actors: Michel Simon, Jean Dasté, Dita Parlo, Louis Lefebvre, Louis Berger
Directors: Jean Vigo
Format: Black & White, Full Screen, NTSC, Special Edition, Subtitled, Widescreen
Language: French
Subtitles: English
Region: Region A/1 (Read more about DVD/Blu-ray formats.)
Aspect Ratio: 1.77:1
Number of discs: 1
Rated: Unrated
Studio: Criterion Collection
DVD Release Date: August 30, 2011
Run Time: 161 minutes
Cast & Crew - Complete Jean Vigo
Jean Vigo Director
This set contains DVDs which may be available separately:
À Propos De Nice
Taris
Zero for Conduct
L'Atalante
|