Um dos filmes mais belos da história.

L’Atalante

by Robert Horton

Somewhere on the criss-crossed, free-flowing canals and waterways of world cinema, a small barge called “L’Atalante,” launched in 1934, glides along even today. It always will; the permanence of movies bestows immortality on the vessel, and on the motion picture that carries its name, and on the fevered young director who gave himself so completely to film that he died from the giving.

People like to invoke the “magic” of film, but the truth is that movies rarely soar above the nagging, earthbound requirements of plot or realism. Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante, however, is a magic thing: luminous, suspended, utterly (even misleadingly) simple, much closer to a fable than a novel, and imbued with its director’s drunken infatuation with cinema. No wonder Francois Truffaut, surely the filmmaker most obviously influenced by the privileged moments of Vigo’s films, once wrote that with L’Atalante Vigo “achieved perfection, he made a masterpiece.”

It is somewhat miraculous that Vigo made the film at all. The director’s unhappy and sickly childhood was crowned by the death of his father, a left-wing radical, under mysterious circumstances while in prison for alleged wartime treason. After studying film, Vigo made two shorts, including A Propos de Nice, and then the remarkable featurette Zero de Conduite. Despite the controversy caused by the latter film, Vigo was rewarded the chance to make his first feature, from a traditional screenplay—a conventional story that Vigo promptly re-worked. Pitifully ill with chronic lung problems, Vigo had to direct some scenes from L’Atalante while lying on a cot.

The movie begins, like a proper fable, with a wedding. The blond bride, Juliette (Dita Parlo) is going off with husband Jean (Jean Daste) on his canal barge. They will travel and live with a cabin boy (Louis Lefevre) and an eccentric first mate, Pere Jules (Michel Simon), a tattooed ape-man who tells unbelievable stories of Havana, Caracas, Shanghai. On an early day on the boat, Juliette discovers that one of Jules’ many cats has had kittens in her bed— a curious omen, like an inscrutable sign in a fairy tale. Much of what follows is Juliette’s adjustment to life on the water: the lovers’ embraces and spats, the excitement of docking in Paris, the jovially peculiar world of Pere Jules. The final act of the story sees Juliette lured away by the appeal of the city, for a while, as Jean sails miserably without her.

As Truffaut observed, “Two of the major tendencies of cinema—realism and aestheticism—are reconciled in the film.” Vigo and cinematographer Boris Kaufman (the brother of Russian filmmaker Dziga Vertov, and later an Oscar-winning Hollywood cameraman) capture the absolute reality of waterfronts and smokestacks and human faces, with a naturalistic eye that reflects the British documentary film movement and predicts Italian neo-realism. But through some seamless alchemy, these sights are pixillated by Vigo’s commitment to the love story, which is tender and truthful and lovely. In one of many superstitious asides, Juliette tells Jean that if you open your eyes under water, you can see the face of the person you love. This leads him to dunk his head in a bucket and then dive into the river—and also leads to a dreamlike passage late in the film, when Jean, separated from Juliette, ducks in the canal and “sees” her floating under water in her wedding dress.

Vigo captures love in less expressionistic ways, too. There is a long-held close-up of husband and wife embracing on the boat that may be the most ecstatic hug in movie history—the joy and wonder and sexy thrill of being newly wed play across Juliette’s face as the accordion wheezes and Jean sings the song of the seamen in her ear. (If the incandescent Dita Parlo looks familiar, you may be remembering her as the German woman who takes in the escapees in Jean Renoir’s Grand Illusion.) But this is not a bowdlerized picture of love: Vigo also depicts the lovers squirming with undisguised erotic longing in their separate beds.

Then there are those elements of L’Atalante that defy rational description. The cheerful thoughtlessness with which Pere Jules tosses around his cats, the sight of a bride walking eerily across the top of the barge at night, the way Jean creeps toward the camera as a line of trees curve perfectly on the shoreline behind him—these are the glimmerings of a hugely original vision. Magic erupts in the most ordinary circumstances: Pere Jules, frustrated in his efforts to revive a gramophone, idly begins to trace his finger across the surface of a record…and music plays! Jules stops, the music stops; he fingers the record again, and the music starts again. In a moment we will learn that the music has been made by the cabin boy, goofing on the accordion, but Vigo’s point has been made. The world is full of marvels.

There is something seriously wrong with anyone who does not love Michel Simon’s performance as Pere Jules, the braying old salt whose cabin holds (barely) a lifetime’s worth of knickknacks. The monkey-faced Simon had just scored popular successes in two Renoir films, La Chienne and Boudu Saved From Drowning, and would remain a cherished character star of French cinema. He inhabits the role of Pere Jules with gruff authority, embodying the role of experience. Or is it innocence?

Simon’s presence in L’Atalante probably helped it get made, but nothing helped the movie be seen by audiences in 1934. Taken from Vigo’s control by an unsympathetic distributor, the film was retitled La Chaland Qui Passe after a hit song of the moment, and the song was added to the mutilated release print (thus covering up some of Maurice Jaubert’s marvelous music). It opened in Paris in September 1934 and closed within three weeks. A few days later, on October 5, Jean Vigo died at the age of 29, not knowing his film would influence a generation of moviemakers and eventually end up on international surveys of the greatest films ever made (the Sight and Sound polls of 1962 and 1992).

For years L’Atalante floated around in prints that critic Terrence Rafferty aptly described as “uniformly atrocious,” with fuzzy soundtracks and dialogue that was “often just a low rumble of undifferentiated sound.” In 1990 the film was lovingly restored by Pierre Philippe and Jean-Louis Bompoint, who found nine minutes of footage that had probably never been seen by any audience, ever. They even executed a delightful sequence indicated by Vigo’s notes but uncompleted by the director: as Pere Jules demonstrates wrestling holds on the deck of the barge, he flops about in a series of whimsical trick dissolves. It’s exactly in the spirit of Vigo’s playful style.

Why has L’Atalante exuded such a beguiling spell, even in ratty 16 mm. prints, even in incomplete versions? Certainly its simplicity makes it easy to relate to; somehow it feels like every love story ever lived—the joys, the jealousies, the rift, the reconciliation. It is a tale of innocence and experience, in a nearly mythical sense. The film is also a paean to the joys of making movies, to the uniqueness of what movies can do that the other arts cannot. And let’s not discount the allure of Vigo’s own story, the tragedy of a young genius cut down at the beginning of a brilliant life.

Lindsay Anderson, the English director whose 1968 film If… was directly influenced by Vigo’s Zero de Conduite, put this film in its proper place. Writing at the time of the 1990 restoration of L’Atalante, Anderson said of Vigo and his final statement: “He left a film that opposes, more wholly and more beautifully than any I can think of, the conception of cinema that largely obtains today—a cinema of sensation, of technical display, of coarse (however sophisticated) commercialism. Vigo’s cinema is intimate and personal, its ideas always poetic. The only violence is that of truthful, whole-hearted feeling.”

But there is something else. Some works of art are transparent, letting us clearly see the faces of the persons who made them. With L’Atalante, you are never in doubt that the creator of this work is right there, a distinct personality: wise, youthful, melancholy, ingenious, lyrical—a collector of things. A collector of moments. When we watch L’Atalante we see, as surely as Jean sees Juliette in the water, Jean Vigo’s face.

Normally I much prefer to remark on birthdays, rather than anniversaries of death, but however today is the anniversary of the death in 1934 of Jean Vigo. So I think you should watch at least the clip below from, and possibly all of, L’Atalante. But before you get there here’s a little film that shows exactly how lucky you are to be able to.

Vigo’s masterpiece was L’Atalante. (His entire oeuvre is available in one DVD.) He was given the banal bones of the story to work with, and made it into something great – interior and both personal and universal. Its visual images are among the most beautiful in all of cinema. But he was in the final stages of TB when he was shooting the film, insisting on coming sometimes even on a stretcher – he knew his time was running out and he was determined to get the film done. But the producers mangled the final cut, inserting (and naming the film after) a popular song; the initial run was disastrous. Vigo was too ill to do anything about it by then, and died a few weeks after the release, thinking it had failed.

And you know, when they say things like, “Vigo was adopted as a major influence on the Nouvelle Vague in France and on subsequent filmmaking”, or, “Vigo was an exponent of poetic realism of the thirties,” it just isn’t telling you anything. First of all there is the fact that it wasn’t nearly as inevitable as all that. He barely got to make anything at all, and he was dead before he was 30. He was poor, he wasn’t a big industry figure. Then there’s the producers’ mangling of his picture, and the huge effort needed to restore it nearly 60 years after his death. That we can watch this movie at all is a miracle.

But aside from that, what they mean is, he can use the external medium of film to show the nature of inner reality.  That this inner reality is so real, so hard, that it amounts to a rebellion. The film is like the film of both a very young and a very old man at once. L’Atalante is just more special than most movies. I can’t really write about it. (Maybe that’s just what poetic realism is, because they say the same thing about Les Enfants du Paradis, another film I can’t write about.) Then again, there is more to both L’Atalante and Les Enfants than meets the (as it were) eye, and it;s possible that it;s in this disjuncture – or layering – that the reality resides. As Robert Frost said, “poetry is what gets lost in the translation.” Les Enfants was a triumph of the French resistance; and Jean Vigo was an anarchist filmmaker with a keen feeling for people, whose short career was dogged by censorship. Both these films demonstrate the political in the personal, if you know where to look for it:

Of Vigo’s two features, it is interesting that L’Atalante is most often considered the stronger of the two, despite its being the film least in Vigo’s control. After Zero de Conduit was banned by French censors, Vigo’s producers felt they might rein in the controversy on his next film by supplying a politically innocent script, the story of young newly-weds, Jean (Jean Daste) and Juliette (Dita Parlo), whose marriage matures on a cargo barge floating down the Seine. Given Vigo’s sensibilities, however, the final cut of the film could not but be rife with subversion. The simple story arc, seeing Jean and Juliette separate for a time only to be reunited, suggests a paean to the conservative commitments of marriage; hand it to Vigo to interpret the theme of marital maturation as erotic awakening. Even more central to the story — and the subversion — is Pere Jules (Michel Simon), Jean’s crotchety old assistant, whose body is tattooed over in crudely sexual caricatures and revolutionary epithets.

Another factor in the freshness of Vigo’s vision is the freshness, at that stage, if cinema itself. Here’s another paragraph from the intensely interesting page the preceding one came from, and I really recommend that you go and read the whole thing. It even has a poem by Kenneth Rexroth.

Anarchism has always had its martyrs; some cynics would say that’s all it has ever had. Haymarket, Durutti, Sacco & Vanzetti — to the list, cinema hastily adds Vigo. Because he was alive at a time when film was still developing its elementary grammar — and with sound, still learning to speak — Vigo’s biography inevitably reads like a portrait of both the artist and the Art as a young man. Every discovery, every excitement for Vigo, this early in the medium’s history, was almost inevitably an excitement for cinema itself. And because he died young, film history laments not only what he could have achieved, but what cinema could have achieved. One critic in post-Liberation France, writing of Vigo’s first film, inadvertently defines martyrdom: “the most moving thing about Zero de Conduite, perhaps better than the film itself, better than this discovery of a past, is precisely this image of a future which would never be realized.”

And here’s the opening of a good general page on Vigo (with an excellent photograph if him as a child, with his parents):

Of all cinema’s illustrious martyr figures, none is more romantic than Jean Vigo, poet maudit of ’30s French cinema, dead at 29 after a long struggle with tuberculosis, leaving a filmography that can be screened in just over three hours and which, during his lifetime, showed every sign of vanishing into oblivion. But the ethereal beauty and earthy anarchism that permeate his two masterpieces Zero de conduite (1933) and L’Atalante (1934) are still enveloping audiences in their hypnotic atmosphere today and leaving them sure in the knowledge that Vigo was more than a filmmaker – he was a moment in film history that will never be repeated.

Click the photo to watch a clip. “Embedding forbidden.” As it were.

And here’s a link to Matinée Idle, the charmingly-named blog whose author alerted me to this anniversary in a comment the other day. Many thanks Keiron!

Michel Simon in 'L'Atalante'

Tuberculosis is, I think we could all agree, a bit of a bugger. Not content with inflicting its sufferings on the rank-and-file of humanity, the disease has, over the years, sought out and killed some of the greatest names in world literature. D.H. Lawrence, Anton Chekhov, Emily Brontë, Franz Kafka; all died well before their natural time, leaving us to speculate on what treasures or disappointments we might have been left with had they lived longer.  

Tuberculosis gave the world of cinema one of its first martyrs too when, on 5^th October 1934, Jean Vigo died at the age of 29. The director left only four films behind, of which only one is a feature. Nevertheless, 75 years after his death, Vigo’s reputation continues to loom large in world cinema. His feature, L’Atalante, frequently crops up in lists of the top ten films of all time, while the director himself, who had to fight against almost impossible odds to realise his artistic vision, has become something of a patron saint for indie film-makers everywhere.

Vigo was born in Paris, the son of an anarchist agitator who was murdered in prison when the boy was 12. A sickly child, he spent much of his early life in boarding schools and sanatoriums. In 1930, at the age of 25, Vigo’s father-in-law leant him the money to buy a film camera. With his cinematographer Boris Kaufman, he made two guerrilla-style documentaries over the next two years. The first, Apropos de Nice, is a satire disguised as a travelogue. Taking their camera onto the streets of Nice (sometimes hidden in a pram), Kaufman and Vigo filmed the rich and the beautiful sunning themselves on the seafront and the poor and desperate knuckling down to a hard day’s work in the back streets. For their next film Taris they took as a subject French Olympic swimming hopeful Jean Taris, and explored new ways of shooting underwater.

In 1933 Vigo revisited his unhappy schooldays with Zéro de Conduite, the tale of an uprising in a repressive boarding school. The film was short (42 minutes), filled with unforgettable images and considered so dangerous by the French authorities that it was banned until after the Second World War. Lindsay Anderson’s 1968 film If… is almost a re-make, and a tribute to the original.  

'Zéro de Conduite'

In 1934, and in failing health, the director embarked on his last and most important piece of work, L’Atalante. The feature-length script was assigned to Vigo by the film studio Gaumont. On paper, the story is unremarkable: the skipper of a barge marries a village girl; they live together on the barge with his two-man crew; they argue; she is tempted by the bright lights of Paris and runs away; they miss each other and are eventually re-united.

Vigo’s great achievement was to take this simple material and turn it into something profound and poetic. For a start, the relationship between the skipper and his new wife is a million miles away from most on-screen relationships of the Thirties. The couple bicker and canoodle, whispering secrets to one another one moment and harbouring brooding resentments the next. It’s a passionate, uncertain relationship: the kind that a young married couple would have had in those days of quick, early marriages.  Above all it feels real, uncomplicated by the needs of the storyteller to draw any easy conclusions from the couple’s behaviour.

This naturalism extends to the other characters too. Père Jules, played by character actor Michel Simon, is a tattooed, accordion-playing sea dog who lives in a cluttered cabin on the barge. In one of the film’s most memorable scenes, Jules escorts the skipper’s young wife around his cabin, showing her the collection of objects that he has amassed on his trips around the world. At one stage she opens a cupboard door only to find the severed hands of one of Jules’ old comrades preserved in a jar of formaldehyde. The old sailor shows her his tattoos. He plays the accordion for her. He puts a lit cigarette in his belly button and clowns around. The scene feels almost improvised, but it tells us much more about the bride and the old man than dozens of pages of carefully-scripted dialogue ever could.

Dita Parlo and Jean Dasté in 'L'Atalante'

And then there are the moments of pure cinematic poetry: the skipper diving into the water to search for the image of his lost love; the bride shivering on the pavement as she eyes the window display in a Paris department store; the separated lovers turning fitfully in their sleep in separate beds. It’s hard to imagine that even as Vigo shot these images he probably knew he was dying.

L’Atalante did not suffer a happy fate. The director lived just long enough to see his film re-cut by the studio and rebranded as a jaunty musical named Le Chaland Qui Passe (The Passing Barge). Songs were added and much of Vigo’s original material was discarded. For any artist, let alone one on his last legs, it would have been a crushing blow. 

Thankfully, the legend of L’Atalante lived on, and there have been several attempts over the years to restore the director’s cut. The version that we have now, while not perfect, is at least close to the film that Vigo intended to make, allowing his vision and artistry to shine through.  

So, on 5^th October, I hope I will not be alone in raising a glass to Jean Vigo. Every film-maker today who finds him or herself shooting on the hoof or trying to cobble together a crew for a micro-budget short is, in some way, following in Vigo’s venerable footsteps. Had he lived longer or been born in the digital age, who knows what heights he may have reached? As it is, we have L’Atalante, which remains a great, moving and inspirational piece of work and a reminder that, whatever else may happen, great cinema endures.

Next week, Michael Winner.

Direção: Jean Vigo

Título Original: Zéro de Conduite: Jeunes Diables au Collège

País: França

Ano de Lançamento: 1933

Duração: 41’

Considerado um dos filmes que inspirou a Nouvelle Vague na França, em especial o clássico Os incompreendidos, de François Truffaut, Zero de Comportamento (1933), do diretor Jean Vigo, além de brincar em muitos momentos com a linguagem cinematográfica, trata com muita ironia das relações entre os alunos e a escola.

Passado em um colégio interno, no qual os alunos são retratados simpaticamente como portadores da revolta e os “adultos” são constantemente satirizados, a escola é apresentada nesse filme como detentora de um sistema de valores opressivos e ao mesmo tempo ridículos.

Satiriza-se a hierarquia da escola, em grande medida, a partir da patética figura do diretor da escola, representado por uma criança portando uma barba postiça. No entanto, a crítica do filme vai mais longe do que tratar apenas de temas concernentes ao ambiente escolar. Estão presentes aí, nem sempre de maneira velada, questões como a homossexualidade ou a pedofilia.

Além disso, consideramos que Zero de Comportamento pode ser também tomado como uma metáfora da sociedade, na qual os professores e diretores da escola seriam associados às elites e os enfants revoltosos seriam tomados como representação da revolução social que emanaria das camadas oprimidas. Um filme muito interessante que, sem dúvida, merece ser visto.

Vigo’s second film, commissioned after the success of A propos de Nice. Note Vigo’s use of a poetic, lyrical cinematic language even in this straightforward celebrity profile piece.

video originally posted to youtube by the invaluable Tom Sutpen.

A Propos de Nice was Jean Vigo’s first film. It’s a docu-essay of sorts chronicling the city of Nice and the contrast between the upper class and the lower class inhabitants. Vigo juxtaposes the mechanical masses of the upper class with the hard work, jubilant fun and modesty of the lower class.  The satire is fairly brutal stuff, with Vigo juxtaposing images of animals(like crocodiles and birds — perhaps signifying the upper class’ predatory nature) with the lifeless rich simply going through the motions of their privileged lives, not appreciating the world around them and the community at hand. Vigo was influenced by Vertov’s classic The Man with the Movie Camera, and he attempts his own brand of camera acrobatics to a kinetic and blissful result. Certain shots of looming smoke stacks and buildings filmed from the bottom straight up suggest an increasingly mechanized world that terrified Vigo. Most surprising is what seems to be Vigo’s envy of these lower class people. He observes them in a flattering way, rendering them more like the crowd he had, or wished to, identify himself with. They work hard doing the thankless work nobody else wants to do, but it’s this dedication and appreciation for life that makes their fun so enviable.

Si todos somos una parte de Dios, entonces Dios debe ser, de verdad, horrible.

Ronald Firbank

1.

Resulta que un lector de cierta editorial que no aceptó mi novela “Alytzia Abbondanza” (a pesar de que el informe fue muy favorable) me indicó las similitudes de ésta con “En torno a las excentricidades del cardenal Pirelli”, de Ronald Firbank.

La cosa me sorprendió, puesto que no conocía la novela.

Ahora la leo,

y encuentro ligeras semejanzas con la primera escena de ambas novelas, es cierto, pero donde Firbank es artísticamente excéntrico, yo sitúo el centro del conflicto. En adelante hay semejanzas, sí, en el tono y algunas acciones que sospechosamente se parecen entre ambas novelas. Y es difícil, porque yo no la había leído.

Pero en el orden general de las cosas, no. Rotundamente no.

Diría que Firbank es Fellini donde yo soy Jean Vigo.

Yo más poético, él más estrambótico.

Yo grotesco, él caricaturesco. Él megalómano, yo sintético.

Respecto al lenguaje propiamente, no me podría pronunciar, puesto que me guío por la traducción de Sergio Pitol para Anagrama. Tendría que tener el original para pronunciarme con rigor en este sentido.

Y, en fin, que estas cosas son curiosas; ya supongo que recordarán aquello de Borges de que “cada cual se crea sus predecesores”. Lo realmente fascinante es que sean otros quienes te los descubran. Así que estoy muy contento de la semejanza que me hizo el mencionado lector de la  editorial que, al cabo, no quiso publicarme.

2.

He olvidado muchos detalles relativos a aquellas vivencias, porque apenas he pensado en ellas desde entonces, pero recuerdo que las noches eran luminosas [1]

Así de luminosa se me ha puesto el alma al comenzar la novela “Pan”, de Hamsun. Hace muchísimo tiempo que lo tengo pendiente, que lo veo y le busco las vueltas… porque quería comenzar por “Hambre”, pero no he conseguido ningún ejemplar.

Tan contento me he puesto (estaba leyendo en el baño) que me he metido a la noche a depilarme… ustedes ya saben qué. En una arrebato, así, zum, de una vez.

En fin, que además he terminado de escribir la novela corta “Carlota (o El Beso)” (67 págs antes de la corrección final) que me venía fastidiando desde 2006.

Es raro cómo sucede que hasta que no llega el momento oportuno uno no consigue acometer debidamente con las cosas. Sobre todo en narrativa.

Somos ambiciosos en nuestro proyectos, pero nos frena (y bien juiciosamente) nuestra razón (al saberse adoleciendo del conocimiento necesario del mundo que necesitamos para tal proyecto).

El momento de Carlota llegó estas últimas semanas, coincidiendo con mi vuelta a Barcelona.

Si tuviera que marcar dos coordenadas para este libro yo mencionaría  “La puerta estrecha” de Andre Gide y “Primer Amor” de Turgueniev, con la particularidad de que “Carlota (o El Beso)” es una novela totalmente postmoderna (con lo que yo detesto el postmodernismo) dado que rompe la expectativa de redención de los personajes de la narrativa clásica.

De un modo frontal contradice la siguiente afirmación canónica:

“through repetition a trauma from the past may eventually be recognized and mastered” [2]

Es, por ello, a un tiempo una oda y una repudia de la banalización contemporánea. Y asimismo, una llamada de atención al hecho de que los actos tienen consecuencias irreparables.

Sí, de alguna manera podría decirse que tiene también un precedente en la novela Atonement, del año 2001 y escrita por el inglés Ian McEwan. Diría, sí, que es la réplica a dicha novela.

Porque

“there are always antecedent causes. A beginning is an artifice, and what recommends one over another is how much sense it makes of what it follows” ” [3]

A ver si hay suerte y alguna editorial se nos anima

[jsdemontfort (at) gmail (dot) com]

3.

Así que más contento no puedo estar.

He acabado la novela con casi 11 días de antelación a mis previsiones más optimistas.

Y encima hoy Ángela me regaló dos de los libros a los que les tenía unas ganas extraordinarias (y me los llevé de paseo) y que me van a garantizar unos días de deleite supremo:

1. “Lo importante es perder” (Manuel Pérez Subirana)

2. “Tulipanes para Zamudio” (Javier G. Cozzolino)

>>CONTENIDO EXTRA:

Y como prueba de que no es todo alegría y fanfarria en la vida del escritor, aquí me tienen, cargando con un aspirador nuevo y la compra del Carrefour, Ravaleando, como aquel que dice:

[1] Knut Hamsun. Pan. Ed. Anagrama. Barcelona. 2006. [pág. 8]

[2] Peter Buse. Drama + Theory: Critical approaches to modern British Drama. Manchester University Press. New York. 2001. [pág. 174]

[3] Ian McEwan. Enduring Love. Vintage (Random House). London. 1997. [pag. 17]

Jean Vigo escrito por Paulo Emílio Salles Gomes é uma descoberta. Foi uma descoberta quando escrito em Paris no ano de 1957. Vigo, que morrera em 1934, ainda não era tido como um dos grandes do cinema francês, e a busca de um brasileiro em levantar dados precisos sobre o cineasta que produziu três longas e morreu antes dos trinta anos chamou a atenção da crítica especializada.

André Bazin, o grande crítico e líder da geração que formaria mais tarde a Nouvelle Vague, escreveu “Com um amor só igualado por sua paciência e erudição, Paulo Emílio Salles Gomes, responsável pela Cinemateca de São Paulo, escreveu sobre Jean Vigo uma obra que eu qualificaria de exemplar.”

O livro serve para revelar dois grandes amantes do cinema, Jean Vigo e o próprio Paulo Emílio. Lançado em Paris e traduzido para o inglês em 1971 pela Universidade da Califórnia, só chegou ao Brasil em 1984, quase trinta anos depois de publicado na França.

Quando perguntado pela demora na publicação nacional de uma de suas maiores obras Paulo dizia “Não sei se Jean Vigo terá aqui o mesmo interesse.” Como não se interessar pelo cineasta que é citado nas memórias de Jean Renoir, Luís Buñuel e François Truffaut?

Depois de ler o trabalho de Paulo Emílio escrito em 1957 podemos ter a certeza que a obra continua atual e intacta. Tanto Vigo quanto o livro. Jean Vigo morreu pobre e tendo seu terceiro e último filme mutilado pelos produtores. Somente depois da guerra, na década de 50, L’ Atalante é relançado com quase todo o material que Vigo montou.

De seus três filmes principais todos tiveram problemas. O primeiro A Propos de Nice (1929) sofreu com a produção, a falta de apoio e com o pouco interesse por parte da crítica, o segundo Zéro de Conduite (1933) foi censurado na estréia e antes disso Jean teve sérios atritos com o estúdio co-produtor a Gaumont-Franco-Film.

L’ Atalante nasceu dentro do medo. Poucos acreditavam nele e ter um filme censurado abalou a confiança dos produtores em Vigo. Antes de morrer Jean Vigo dizia que L’ Atalante era o responsável por sua doença. Vigo que sempre teve uma saúde fraca se submeteu a um verdadeiro martírio para concluir o filme e chegou a filmar com trinta e oito graus, febril, embaixo da neve.

Cena de Zéro de Conduite

Jean Vigo faleu em 5 de outubro de 1934 e seu filme cortado, mutilado e transformado no fracasso Le Chaland qui passe parece ter morrido junto com ele. Somente nas décadas de 50 e 60, o nome de Jean Vigo iria ressurgir na França, na Europa e até na América. Paulo Emílio afirma:

“O lugar ocupado por Vigo no cinema francês é extraordinário. A lista de cineastas franceses cujas obras – sem levar em conta sua significação momentânea ou seu interesse histórico – constituem por seu valor permanente, uma contribuição à cultura cinematográfica (Méliès, Cohl, Linder, Gance, Clair, Renoir e Vigo) é curta e poderia ainda ser reduzida. Se, com rigor exagerado, reduzíssemos esta lista a quatro nomes, o de Vigo nela permaneceria. A obra principal de Vigo, situada entre Le Million e La Règle du Jeu, domina, com a de Renoir e Clair, o cinema francês moderno, isto é, o dos anos trinta.”

Cena de Zéro de Conduite

A special purpose episode from the guys to take everyone through The Ten: The Requel. John joins with Tom and Sam in identifying the ten films he wants to watch in the next two months, but not after Sam and Tom praise Fritz Lang and Satyajit Ray and question the judgement of David Lean and Michael Cimino. Oh dear.

Download The Movie Overdose Episode 24.5

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Don’t think less of me… 5 movies I really should have seen by now.

1. L’ Atalante by Jean Vigo

2. La Dolce Vita by Frederico Fellini

3. Pather Panchali by Satyajit Ray

4. My Darling Clementine by John Ford

5. The Conformist by Bernardo Bertolucci

Finalmente, el último de los cuatro artículos sobre cine que hice para el “El Conservador”. Sobre el francés Jean Vigo (abril, 2005):

“JEAN VIGO, vanguardia fílmica”

Ángel Rey Gallego

Este 26 de Abril [de 2005] se cumple el centenario del nacimiento del vanguardista Jean Vigo, que en apenas unos años de vida activa como realizador revolucionó el mundo del séptimo arte con sus películas, filmografía cuya duración total no llega a las 3 horas. Hizo un interesantísimo corto documental de la ciudad de Niza titulado “A propósito de Niza” (“À propos de Nice” ); otro corto sobre la natación; “Taris, campeón de natación” (“Taris, roi de l´eau”); el mediometraje “Cero en conducta” (“Zero de conduite”), sobre la revolución de unos chicos en un internado y un único largometraje, de temática amorosa, “L´Atalante”, su obra maestra y canto final ya que, apenas rodada, murió de tuberculosis. Tenía 29 años.

Es muy posiblemente la más grande pérdida de un director joven en la Historia del Cine. Su obra, tan brillante como fugaz, tiene una calidad excepcional siendo uno de los grandes realizadores no sólo de Francia, sino del mundo.

Nació en 1905, en una buhardilla llena de suciedad y gatos. Su padre, de ideas anarquistas, murió en extrañas circunstancias cuando Vigo era niño, el cual, según fue haciéndose mayor, empezó a recopilar información para reivindicar la figura de su progenitor, muy atacado por el poder imperante entonces y tachado en ocasiones hasta de traidor a su patria.

Pasó su niñez y adolescencia en diferentes colegios con nombre falso para no desvelar de quién era hijo. En su juventud contrajo tuberculosis que fue la causa de su temprana muerte. En una de las clínicas donde le trataron conoció a Lydou, afectada de la misma enfermedad, con la que se casó y fue su único amor.

Desde muy pronto, tuvo muy claro que quería dedicarse al cine. El problema era que no tenía suficientes contactos para entrar en ese mundillo. Llegó a trabajar en un rodaje sólo por conocer la elaboración de las películas desde dentro, entusiasmándole de inicio la tarea, pero, cuando aquello acabó, no le bastaba un puesto sin importancia en aspectos artísticos. Quería dirigir.

Conoció al cámara Boris Kaufman, su colaborador habitual en adelante, e inmediatamente se pusieron manos a la obra para realizar un documental mudo sobre la ciudad de Niza (en 2001 se ha editado una versión sonora con música a cargo de Marc Perrone). Jean Vigo comenzó a leer todo tipo de libros para ilustrarse sobre la historia de la ciudad y sus monumentos, hasta que se dio cuenta de que aquello era un mal camino. Debía captar la esencia de Niza y, a la vez, introducir en el documental sus inquietudes políticas, cercanas al anarquismo de su padre, entre las que se incluía una crítica a la burguesía de la época y algunas escenas anticlericales y antimilitaristas. La sátira y la denuncia social están en todo momento presentes. Esta realización es más bien un experimento de montaje, con resultados más que satisfactorios. Una sucesión progresiva de imágenes que se van relacionando unas con otras pasando por diferentes lugares y ambientes de la ciudad. Se ven las personas que caminan por la avenida principal, de variados estratos sociales, los preparativos del Carnaval, las zonas pobres en contraste con las opulentas, un cura que se aleja ante las liberales chicas que bailan en el Carnaval…

Paulo Sallès Gomès trata más extensamente en su libro la elaboración de los films de Vigo, adjuntando anotaciones de las impresiones e ideas que quería plasmar en sus diferentes obras.

En 1931 hace “Taris, campeón de natación”, un pequeño documental deportivo en el que experimenta más en profundidad con la cámara lenta (algo que había iniciado en “A propósito de Niza”). Se recrea en los diferentes movimientos que realiza el nadador cuando está en el agua, pero de tal manera que no resulta aburrido en su poco metraje (9 minutos aprox.). Además, se permite realizar ciertos juegos técnicos con la cámara. Por ejemplo, cuando el nadador sale de la piscina y se va del lugar, tras saludarnos llevándose la mano al sombrero, camina hacia delante semejando que anda sobre las aguas mediante superposiciones de distintas tomas. Aunque no es la pieza más importante de sus obras, nos percatamos perfectamente del componente poético del estilo del autor.

Con “Cero en conducta” llega la más grande de sus polémicas. Es una historia que le sirve para plasmar en el celuloide sus ideales revolucionarios.

La narración está perfectamente dosificada en sus escasos 41 minutos, lo que la ha llevado a ser incluida en la selección de 100 films del libro de John Kobal, junto a la posterior, “L´Atalante”. Está basada, casi con seguridad, en las experiencias de infancia del director. En un estricto internado, los chicos son castigados numerosas veces hasta que, un día, deciden planear una revuelta contra el director y demás mayores. Esto conduce, entre otras, a la mágica escena de la batalla de almohadas, reproducida a cámara lenta, con las plumas volando por los aires.

Está encuadrada en el estilo del realismo poético del autor, con toques surrealistas en algún detalle concreto. Aunque no es la base del mediometraje, los personajes principales están bien definidos, teniendo en cuenta la mayor importancia que tiene el grupo, la clase. Por otro lado, el poder establecido, contra el que va encaminada la protesta, se centra en el ridículo director del internado y los profesores. Le sirve a Vigo para su crítica al sistema y a la burguesía imperante, lo que llevó a que esta obra fuera censurada hasta finales de 1945. Tampoco ayudó que, durante la mencionada “escena de las almohadas”, apareciera, fugaz e imperceptiblemente, el sexo de uno de los niños.

Creo recordar que Garci comentó que, sólo por esta película, Jean Vigo ya merecería un lugar en la Historia del Cine. La tuberculosis le dejó aún tiempo para hacer su único largometraje y obra maestra, “L´Atalante”.

El autor quiso evitar los anteriores problemas con la censura y escogió un guión de tema aparentemente manido, al que supo dotar de su estilo. José Luis Garci, cuando programó este film en su espacio “¡Qué grande es el cine!” (precedido de un interesantísimo documental sobre Jean Vigo y las vicisitudes que corrió “L´Atalante”), mencionó que le había sorprendido que la película de un moribundo demostrara tantas ganas de vivir y tanto optimismo, a pesar de las dificultades.

El argumento trata de una pareja de recién casados que se van a vivir a la barcaza de la que es patrón el marido y, a partir de ahí, poco a poco, surgen roces entre ellos que dan origen al conflicto principal de la película. Tiene un tono profundamente lírico, con escenas muy bellas y de gran fuerza sugestiva, como aquella en la que los dos amantes protagonistas duermen en lugares diferentes, acariciando cada cual su propio cuerpo, recordando de esta manera cuando estaban juntos y el amor que todavía sienten.

Con esta historia, el director destila una narración donde vuelca toda su vitalidad, mientras, a un tiempo, él la está perdiendo en la vida real a marchas forzadas durante un crudo invierno de rodaje. Ya en cama, da las últimas instrucciones de montaje a sus colaboradores. Ha acabado su trabajo. Poco después, muere. Los amigos impiden a su mujer Lydou tirarse por la ventana. La productora cambia de título y música a la película. Se la mutila desde los noventa y tantos minutos a poco más de una hora. Apenas llega a estar unas semanas en cartelera y acaba siendo guardada. Años después se reestrena la obra íntegra recibiendo caústicas críticas (“Tras 12 años de censura la película de un muerto decepciona a sus admiradores” titula el Samedi Soir, el 17 de noviembre de 1945; reproducido en “Jean Vigo” de P. E. Salès Gomès, pág. 279). En los años 90 se restaura con gran dificultad al formato casi original.

Todavía resultan difíciles de encontrar las cintas de un realizador francés, muerto a los 29 años.

Nota agregada: Afortunadamente, en el mismo 2005 salió una estupenda edición en DVD cuajada de extras de la obra íntegra de Jean Vigo.

INFORMACIÓN DE INTERÉS SOBRE JEAN VIGO Y SU OBRA:

* “Jean Vigo”. Paulo E. Salès Gomès. Ed. Circe. Barcelona, 1999.
* “100 Grandes directores de cine”. José María Caparrós Lera. Alianza Editorial. Madrid, 1995.
* “Las 100 mejores películas”. John Kobal. Alianza Editorial. Madrid, 1995.
* “Diccionario del cine”. Georges Sadoul. Ediciones Istmo. Madrid, 1984. (Colección Fundamentos).
* “Historia básica del cine”. Gonzalo Muinelo Alarcón. Edita: Caja de Ahorros Provincial de Valladolid. Valladolid, 1988.

Y EN INTERNET:

* http://pobladores.lycos.es/channels/cine/THE_WILD_ONE/area/44
* http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/02/vigo.html
* http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0897118/
* http://www.nyfavideo.com/content/cat-VIGO.htm
* http://www.kinoki.org/documental/jeanvigo.htm
* http://www.diplomatie.gouv.fr/mediasociete/cinema/promotion/diffusion_nc/collections/galerie/
realisateurs/106.html
* http://increvablesanarchistes.org/articles/biographies/vigo_jean.htm
* http://www.bookrags.com/biography/jean-vigo/
* http://nezumi.dumousseau.free.fr/jeanvigo.htm#bio
* http://www.artificial-eye.com/dvd/ART004vd/main.html
* http://www.artificial-eye.com/dvd/ART004vd/dir.html
* http://movies.yahoo.com/shop?d=hc&cf=gen&id=1800029700
* http://www.videovista.net/reviews/dec04/jeanvigo.html
* http://www.webster.edu/fatc/zero.html

Roma 10 giugno 2009 presso il cinema Trevi di (Vicolo del Puttarello, 25, Fontana di Trevi).presentazione del cofanetto Luis Buñuel. Interverranno Enrico Ghezzi, Stefano Curti, Gianluca Curti e Donatello Fumarola. La Cineteca Nazionale ospiterà presso il Cinema Trevi la presentazione dell’attesissimo cofanetto, editato dal Gruppo Editoriale Minerva RaroVideo, contenente capolavori immortali del cinema surrealista: Un chien andalou, L’age d’or e Las Hurdes. L’edizione, finemente curata da Enrico Ghezzi e Donatello Fumarola, include un corposo libretto bilingue di 60 pagine che raccoglie testi straordinariamente inediti di Julio Bressane, del grande regista Jean Vigo, un testo di presentazione ai tre film scritto da Henri Langlois, fondatore della Cinémathèque française, interventi di Georges Bataille e Enzo Ungari, di André Breton e Antonin Artaud, documenti esclusivi redatti dal Ministero degli Affari Esteri francese e dal Ministero Affari Generali di Parigi riguardanti il caso scoppiato in occasione della proiezione del 1930 di L’age d’or a Parigi, e ancora testi critici sul tema dell’occhio tagliato composti da scrittori quali Aldo Nove, Tommaso Pincio e Tommaso Ottonieri. Ad arricchire ulteriormente il contenuto del booklet testi e poesie dello stesso Buñuel, tratti dalla sua raccolta giovanile Un cane andaluso. Tra i contenuti extra un intervento di Franco Battiato, il commento ai film di Paolo Bertetto ed il cortometraggio Dry Martini (Buñuelino Cocktail), girato appositamente per questa edizione da collezione. Per tale occasione la Cineteca Nazionale collabora con la proiezione di altri autentici capolavori: Diario di una cameriera e Il fantasma della libertà.

Howard Hawks.

A Liga dos Blogues está elegendo os vinte melhores filmes dos anos 30. Já se foi feito listas de todas as décadas recentes, e sempre que pude enviei uma. Essa foi mandada no limite do tempo. São dez filmes, escolhidos com pressa, mas que me soam reais.

Paraíso Infernal, Howard HAWKS (1939)
O Atalante, Jean VIGO (1934)
A Noiva de Frankenstein, James WHALE (1935)
Levada da Breca, Howard HAWKS (1938)
Sócios no Amor, Ernst LUBITSCH (1933)
O Gato Preto, Edgar G. ULMER (1934)
M, o Vampiro de Dusseldorf, Fritz LANG (1931)
A Grande Jornada, Raoul WALSH (1930)
Scarface, Howard HAWKS (1932)
No Tempo das Diligências, John FORD (1939)

Como qualquer uma, ela é leviana, auto-centrada… Mas listas são divertidas, nem que seja pra quem as faz.

Cena de "Acossado" (Godard), que abre a mostra Mademoiselle Nouvelle Vague

por Natália Albertoni

Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Jacques Rivette, Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer, Jacques Demy, Alain Resnais, Louis Malles, Jean Renoir, Jean Vigo, Jean-Pierre Melville. Ufa! Esse time de peso somado, ainda, a alguns nomes que nunca ficariam no banco de reservas da seleção das telonas, compõe o elenco de primeira que pode ser conferido no clico “Mademoiselle Nouvelle Vague”.

Elaborado pela Cinemateca Brasileria para celebrar o cinquentenário deste movimento cinematográfico, crítico e responsável pela revelação dos maiores cineastas franceses, apresenta os filmes mais expressivos da nouvelle vague, além de raridades como “A Baía dos Anjos (1963)”, de Jacques Demy,  e “Adieu Philippine (1962)”, de Jacques Rozier.

O ciclo tem início esta tarde, às 18h30, com “Acossado”, de Jean-Luc Godard e termina só no dia 2 de agosto. Para saber a programação completa clique aqui.

***

Vá:
Mademoiselle Nouvelle Vague
13/05 a 2/08
Cinemateca Brasileira
Largo Senador Raul Cardoso, 207 – tel: 3512-6111/ próximo ao metrô Vila Mariana
R$8

The summer blockbuster season kicks off for The Movie Overdose with X-Men Origins: Wolverine and, it seems, this wasn’t the best place to start for the folks at MOD. Fortunately they are able to provide an outline of the films they are now looking forward too in the summer. In between all this, they talk about the prospects for Terminator: Salvation, Russell Brand’s acting career, the transcendent genius of Kenji Mizoguchi and Francois Truffaut and find out just how bleak television can be with the Red Riding trilogy.

 Download Episode 17

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