Film archive celebrates Vigo’s brief, brilliant run
The best artists’ work is invested in hard-edged experience — regardless of age.
The range of the artist’s knowledge, what he has seen, whom she has met and known — all these reflect in the gaze that the artist perfects, which the art reflects. And if the great artist is young (Orson Welles, Mary Shelley, the Beatles), the work is invariably invested with go-for-broke kinesis, a gushing stream of innovations (which may work or not) that whirl faster than the artist’s audience in his or her time can keep up with.
In the films of Jean Vigo (1905-34), one of the most passionate of film artists, experience was always pulled, pearl-like, from down and dirty gutters, where binaries melted in the presence of vigorous life. Vigo rewires your artistic senses by taking you to places where you hadn’t expected such profundity to flourish. In Vigo, time slows to a tapeworm’s crawl, scaling down a mystical contemplation of big-S Subjects (love, childhood, the poverty gap) to a handful of unforgettable moments. For more than 80 years, Vigo has taught us to appreciate a cat’s prowl, the raucous energy of kids (revolutionaries in training), the rough and solid skin of the lover’s cheek as the girl’s whiskers meet the boy’s stubble, a softly queered, awesome joining of corner hairs.
During November, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive will mount a retrospective of Vigo’s four films — “À Propos de Nice” (1929), “Taris” (1931), “Zero for Conduct” (1933) and “L’Atalante” (1934) — plus two documentaries of the rushes, outtakes and different versions of “Zero” and “L’Atalante.”
It takes only 173 minutes to watch all of Vigo’s films. Yet what immense
ground he covers. What tough beauty he uncovers in four films, in 29 years of life. (He died of tuberculosis before he could see the final cut of “L’Atalante,” considered to be his magnum opus.)
Vigo’s leftist upbringing was central to the radical poetry overheard in his films. He was born in 1905 to two staunch anarchists, Emily Clero and Miguel Almereyda. In August 1917, for his firebrand articles aimed against the French government during wartime, Vigo’s father was imprisoned by right-wing officials and murdered — strangled by his own bootlaces — when Vigo was only 12. Afterward, Vigo slummed around in a series of boarding schools. The misery of those militarized barracks and the nastiness of his schoolmasters would provide fodder for his 40-minute hellraising ode to rebellious schoolchildren, “Zero for Conduct,” in 1933.
As he matured, young Vigo devoted himself to photography and cinema, watching movies endlessly. When he married Elisabeth Lozinka, whom he met in a tuberculosis sanatorium, her father gave him a movie camera, which he used to make one of the great city symphony silents, “À Propos de Nice.” With a playful, spontaneous and relaxed regard, Vigo and his collaborator, Russian cinematographer Boris Kaufman, reveal the vast universal gap between the rich and the poor, the hedonist spendthrifts who frequent the Nice casinos during and the grimy, working-class poor who breastfeed their kids and scrub their linens. In a 1930 manifesto, Vigo wrote that the
“Jean Vigo Regained”:
“L’Atalante” 7 p.m. Friday, Nov. 2 and 5 p.m. Friday, Nov. 23. “Taris” and outtakes from “L’Atalante” 7 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 4. “À Propos de Nice” and “Zero for Conduct,” with outtakes 3:30 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 17. $5-$13. Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, 2155 Center St., Berkeley. 510-642-0808. www.bampfa. berkeley.edu film was a “rough draft” of a soon-to-come “social cinema,” a cinema that combines the real and the fictive to “reveal the hidden reason behind a gesture.” Over and over again, Vigo’s films wriggle and writhe in this physicality, the blood of life’s pleasure and pain.
Vigo’s cinema is strewn with unpolished moments, the mark of a man obsessed with looking at life from the margins rather than the obvious, event-hungry center. A Vigo scene unfolds with precious disregard for where the scene is going, how it fits into the makeshift plot. Poetic accidents rule his enchanting worlds. A camera soaks in the teeming pedestrian life on a Nice boardwalk as if it were shot from the shaky, unsteady hip of a hyperactive kindergartner. In “L’Atalante,” a heavenly 89-minute romance along the French canals that conveys what it feels like to desperately long for a lost someone, a stray black cat crosses the scene of two newlyweds sharing a meal. The words of a forgotten French chanteuse recorded on a lousy sound system come out garbled, but the lovely melody does not. Later, the desperate husband jumps into the water trying to catch a glimpse of his wife, from whom he’s separated; she appears magically, twirling and laughing to the haunting pulse of an accordion waltz. We can see her, but he cannot; he keeps looking and looking — a moment of utter devastation and bottomless
We are the children of Vigo, and we owe a huge debt to our indefatigable father, that leftisthumanist bard of crummy loveliness. Truffaut’s excellent films about childhood — “The 400 Blows” (1959), “Antoine et Colette” (1962), “Small Change” (1976) — are unimaginable without Vigo. So, too, are the works of Godard, Bertolucci, Resnais, Lumet, Kazan and Hong Sang-soo.
Vigo’s films are the result of a mind in a passionate rush, an artist who had to tell the world all that he had seen and loved and understood, before time ran out on him — as it eventually does for all of us. Carlos Valladares is a freelance writer.