Shame on those who, during their puberty, murdered the person they might have become.
Or, re his film, A propos de Nice:
[The film presents] the last gasp of a society so lost in its escapism that it sickens you and makes you sympathetic to a revolutionary solution.
And on the true aim of the Social Documentary:
The aim of the social documentary is achieved when it suceeds in revealing the hidden meaning of a gesture, when it shows up the hidden beauty or the grotesqueness of an ordinary-looking individual. The social documentary must lay bare the mechanism of society by showing it to us in its purely physical manifestations.
And it must do this so forcefully that the world we once looked at with such indifference now appears to us in its essence, stripped of its falsehoods. The social documentary must rip the blinkers from our eyes.
And finally:
The fellow who makes a social documentary clearly states his personal point of view and commits himself one way or another.
At least one of the quotes is from an address Vigo gave upon the second screening of A propos de Nice, in Paris, June 1930. But according to his collaborator and photographer, Boris Kaufman, they had seen Un chien andalou for the first time just the night before. Apparently, Vigo was so enthralled with Bunuel and Dali's masterpiece so much, that he barely spoke about his own masterpiece that day.
(By the way, after Vigo's death, Kaufman eventually went to Hollywood and photographed some of Elia Kazan and Sidney Lumet's films, winning an Oscar for On the Waterfront. He also shot Baby Doll, 12 Angry Men, The Pawnbroker, Splendor in the Grass, The World of Henry Orient, Long Day's Journey in to Night, and many others.)
A propos de Nice is a gently satirical, slightly surreal documentary of the bourgeoisie in Nice, France. It is about twenty-five minutes long. It is bursting with energy, poetic, and breathtaking all in one sweep.
The film is over eighty years old now and if, perhaps, some of the Revolutionary Fervor has been lost in time's translation, none of the magic or lyricism or joy has dimmed, at all.
It is a profound, whirlwind of a debut, and one of only four films Vigo made. Vigo died of tuberculosis in 1934. He was twenty-nine years old.
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| Fantastic hair! |
A propos de Nice is absolutely essential viewing, as are his other three films, Taris (a film about a French olympic swimming champion), Zero de Conduite (a subversive, and ultimately banned in France until after WW2, film about a boarding school rebellion), and his "sell-out" feature-length masterpiece, L'Atalante.
Criterion has grouped all these together in a wonderful blu ray package, full of fantastic essays, commentaries, and featurettes, The Complete Jean Vigo. Crucial for any true cineaste.
Mwah, ...
AH
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