The Complete Jean Vigo Blu-ray

Studio: Criterion

Oct 11, 2011 Web Exclusive By Craig Hubert

Only a few figures in the history of cinema are as mythologized as the director Jean Vigo. The son of anarchist parents, his childhood was spent under assumed names after the mysterious death of his father. He became a figure to look up to for the French New Wave, a tragic hero whose work, which mixed avant-garde poetry with documentary realism, was unfairly mangled during and after his life. Dead at the age of 29, Vigo's brief artistic output can be viewed in a few short hours; his influence, in spirit and on celluloid, shows no signs of ending. The Complete Jean Vigo, released by the Criterion Collection, is the first time the director's work has been presented as a complete package in this country. The two-disc set features the four films Vigo completed before his death, each one slightly longer than the last, as well as a slew of archival documentaries which illuminate the director's life story and his contribution to the art of cinema.

At the age of 25, with a small loan from his father-in-law, Vigo independently produced À propos de Nice (1930), a humorous and playful document of the highs and lows of the seaside resort town of Nice. The silent film, Vigo's first, uses a combination of formal inventiveness and off-the-cuff photography to create a portrait of the stunning divide between classes - in a famous scene, a group of dancers atop a float during a parade is turned into a hypnotic drawl, their lack of inhibitions a transition from joyous to frightening. These subtle shifts, through composition and editing, resemble similar techniques in Dziga Vertov's classic Man with a Movie Camera (1929).

Vigo remained experimental, even without the freedom of his first film. Taris (1931), a short portrait of the record-breaking swimmer Jean Taris commissioned by the filmmaker Germaine Dulac, who at the time was working for the Gaumont Film Company. As noted in the commentary track on the disc by Michael Temple, it's now understood that another filmmaker was brought in later to shoot extra footage, so it's hard to say exactly what to attribute to the which filmmaker; it's said that Vigo later disowned the film for this reason. Even so, there are moments where it's easy to see Vigo experimenting with certain techniques he would later expand on: namely, an intense, almost sexual focus on body movement and the use of underwater photography to create dream-like images.

The surreal childhood mediation Zéro de conduit (1933) is an autobiographical love letter and critique of Vigo's time spent in a boarding school, and one of the most influential French films ever made; Francois Truffaut, in countless interviews and essays, acknowledged the influence on his own 400 Blows (1959). The film was banned soon after its release due to its vision of contempt toward authority and presentation of children in midst of rebellion, mirroring the anarchist values of his heritage. The filmis more than simply an angry tract about childhood oppression; it combines provocation with a playful spirit, the result fully-formed as if through the eyes of a child.

To appreciate the work of Jean Vigo, you must also consider the integral contribution of cinematographer Boris Kaufman. The younger brother of Dziga Vertov, his black-and-white images show a deep understanding of shadow and light, and his use of movement in the frame matched by few at the time. He would go on to a prestigious career in Hollywood, working with Elia Kazan and Sidney Lumet, but rarely matched the brilliance of his work with Vigo. The magnum opus of their work together, L'Atalante (1934), was also sadly the final film they would collaborate on. Vigo, who suffered from tuberculosis most of his short life, was sick throughout the entire production. The completed film was cut by the studio, under the guise of making it more palatable to a commercial audience, and renamed. Three weeks after the film's release, Vigo passed away; his work would continue to grow in stature. After World War II, Vigo's films would be shown in dark cine-clubs in Paris, where he would be discovered by the future revolutionaries of the French New Wave. But L'Atalante still languished in its diminished form. It was not until 1990, when elements of the original cut were found in Italy, that historians were able to piece together a film that closely resembles Vigo's extraordinary vision. (www.criterion.com)

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