Jean Vigo

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Jean Vigo

Jean Vigo , origin. Jean Bonaventure de Vigo Almereyda (born  April 26, 1905 in Paris ; †  October 5, 1934 there ), was a French film director . Despite his early death, he is considered a key figure in French cinema and a pioneer of the Nouvelle Vague .

Childhood and youth

He was the son of Eugène Bonaventure de Vigo, a French anarchist also known as Miguel Almereyda , and Emily Clero. In his childhood he lived on the run with his parents for a long time. Like his entire life, his childhood was also strongly influenced by his tuberculosis disease.

In 1917 his father, who had meanwhile been arrested, was found dead in his prison cell under unexplained circumstances. His father's friends then sent Vigo to boarding school under the false name of Jean Sales . In 1925 he began to study philosophy in Paris - again under his real name - and came into contact with film through Claude Autant-Lara and Germaine Dulac . In 1926 he married Elisabeth “Lydou” Lozinska, a factory owner's daughter from Łódź .

First projects

With financial support from his father-in-law, he made his first film À propos de Nice in 1929 , a highly subversive documentary that explores social inequalities in Nice . The film shows beggars in the slums as well as decadent idlers at the roulette table. They are satirical representations with innovative imagery. In this film, as in the other films, the camera was held by the cameraman Boris Kaufman , brother of the Soviet director Dziga Wertow .

Another documentary film followed in 1931, the short film Taris, roi de l'eau (Taris, King of the Water), a movement study with the swimmer Jean Taris .

Behave insufficiently

In his first feature film, Zéro de Conduite (Behavior Unsatisfactory) , made in 1933, children are the main characters.

A group of boys returns to their country school home after the holidays. The freedom of boarders is restricted by a large number of rules of conduct. Anyone who violates this will receive the grade `` Behavior '' insufficient and must be prepared for a subsequent punishment. The director of the strict regime is an authoritarian headmaster portrayed by a short actor.

The boys used a solemn event to which alumni of the boarding school were invited to rebel against their tyrannical teachers. On the day of the event, the students climb the roof of the school and let objects rain down on the assembled guests.

Although only a story with little plot is told, the film stands out due to its dream-like mood, in which the plot takes a back seat. What the viewer is presented with is more of a sequence of subjective impressions than a consistent course of action. A pillow fight in the shared dormitory is particularly impressive. The scene is filmed in slow motion , which gives it a surrealistic impression.

Zéro de Conduite was banned by censors right after it was completed. The ban remained until 1945.

L'Atalante

Vigo shot his second feature film L'Atalante (1934) when his tuberculosis disease had worsened.

The inland freighter Atalante is sailing the waterways of France. The two protagonists of the film are a newlywed couple who, together with an old eccentric sailor ( Michel Simon ) and a cabin boy, make up the crew. The young wife, played by Dita Parlo , loves her husband ( Jean Dasté ) and tries to escape the restriction of her daily life on waterways. She longs for the excitement that a city like Paris has to offer and is seduced by a hawker into a trip ashore. The husband continues defiantly without her. But he lacks it. For the first time he sees her picture, something he has never succeeded in doing before, by opening his eyes underwater: she floats in front of him like a sweet ghost in her wedding dress. Alone in the big city, she longs for her husband and home on the ship. With the help of the old sailor and a sailor's song, the young couple find their way back together.

In this film, too, which has been repeatedly ranked among the ten best by leading film critics, the reviewers particularly emphasize the visual atmosphere. On the one hand the scenes are described as realistic, on the other hand a magical exaggeration is pointed out. "At first sight a simple marriage story, the film gains a mythical, parable-like dimension through the surreal dream landscape of the Seine," says one review.

In terms of content, the film is about the newlyweds and the love of young bride and groom in front of their first child, a topic that has been conspicuously neglected in film history. Only in Apur Sansar (Apus way into life - 3rd Apus world) does Satyajit Ray create the theme with a similarly magical urgency.

The director François Truffaut wrote down some of the anecdotes about the making of “L'Atalante”. According to these, Vigo is said to have given his stage directions in places, lying on a stretcher. Truffaut wrote: "One can easily imagine that he must have been in some kind of fever while doing this work". When a friend advised him to take more care of his health, Vigo is said to have replied that he lacked time and that he had to give everything now.

After a first unsuccessful test screening, the film was drastically shortened and was re-titled Le chaland qui passe . In this version, too, the film was a commercial failure. Vigo barely survived filming. In 1934, at the age of only 29, he succumbed to tuberculosis. He is buried on the Cimetière de Bagneux near Paris next to his father Miguel Almereyda and his wife Lydou Lozinska.

For a long time the film was only shown in the mangled version. It was not until 1990 that the original version was restored by Jean-Louis Bompoint and Pierre Philippe on behalf of Gaumont , primarily based on a copy of the film discovered by Bompoint in the British National Film and Television Archive . Parts of the dialogue became understandable for the first time thanks to digital sound processing, which removed over 10,000 background noises. The bitter original music by Maurice Jaubert , who also died young, comes into its own.

After the version restored in 1990 was criticized by some critics as "too enthusiastic" due to the almost complete integration of the available material, the film was restored again in 2001 by Bernard Eisenschitz and Vigo's daughter Luce and some scenes from the 1990 version were removed. As a result, there was a sharp dispute between Bompoint and Eisenschitz.

Appreciation

The work of Vigo consists of only two documentaries and two feature films and is less than 200 minutes in total. Nevertheless, Vigo's filmmaking had a great influence on the further development of the film. Especially directors of the Nouvelle Vague refer to his films. A 1990 restored version of L 'Atalante was ranked fifth in the 1992 International Critics' Top Ten Films Poll by Sight & Sound , the British Film Institute's magazine .

1998 Vigo's life under the title was Vigo - Passion for Life by Julien Temple filmed.

Since 1951, the Prix ​​Jean Vigo has been awarded mainly to younger directors in honor of Vigo .

Jean Vigo is the namesake of the film institute ( L'institut Jean Vigo ), founded in Perpignan in 1980 , the second most important film-cultural institution in France.

Filmography

  • 1930: À propos de Nice (short film)
  • 1931: Taris, roi de l'eau (short film)
  • 1933: Inadequate conduct ( Zéro de conduite )
  • 1934: Atalante ( L'Atalante )

Work editions

literature

  • Paulo Emílio Sales Gomes : Jean Vigo. University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles 1971, ISBN 0-520016769 .
  • Pierre Lherminier: Jean Vigo (= Collection Cinéma classique: Les Cinéastes. ). Lherminier, Paris 1984.
  • Michael Temple: Jean Vigo (= French Film Directors. ). Manchester University Press, Manchester 2005, ISBN 0-7190-5632-2 .
  • Florian Scheibe: The films of Jean Vigo: Spheres of play and playfulness (= film and media studies. Vol. 4). Ibidem, Stuttgart 2008, ISBN 978-3-89821-916-7 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Michael Temple: Jean Vigo . Manchester University Press (2005), 108.
  2. ↑ Hommage à L'Atalante (1990), un film de Jean Vigo . In: marcel-carne.com from December 20, 2018.
  3. ^ The dispute over "L'Atalante". Some observations on the work of film restoration, from a conversation with Bernard Eisenschitz . In: kunst-der-vermittlung.de, accessed on August 2, 2020.
  4. ↑ Coffret Jean Vigo. Gaumont . In: DVDClassik.com , May 13, 2003 (French).
  5. ↑ Noel Megahey: The Complete Jean Vigo. In: The Digital Fix , November 10, 2004 (English); Philip French : L'Atalante and the Films of Jean Vigo - review. In: The Guardian , May 13, 2012 (English).
personal data
SURNAME Vigo, Jean
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Jean Bonaventure de Vigo Almereyda (real name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French film director
DATE OF BIRTH April 26, 1905
PLACE OF BIRTH Paris , France
DATE OF DEATH October 5, 1934
Place of death Paris , France