Extract
[...] The same year, a 1934 working copy was found in London by Jean-Louis Bonpoint, but the 1990 restorers did not have time to be fully inspired by it. Nearly 20 years later, in 2001, the French critic, Bernard Eisenschitz, restored the film in a more rigorous way based on the copy found in London, with the aim of returning to the original approved montage by Vigo. In 2017, Gaumont, the French Cinémathèque and The Film Foundation of Martin Scorsese undertook a 4K digital restoration from existing period copies, supervised by the laboratory L'Image Retrouvée. [...]
[...] In this short film, humor manifests itself both through scenes that are totally conscious and accentuate the humor of Jean Taris' message: we think of the plan of 'swimming in a room' which is quite unexpected and funny and also Vigo's wink to the spectator, when Taris starts walking on water. We see from Taris unusual bodily elements, his posture corresponds to positions that we do not take in everyday life. Jean Vigo's gaze allows us to make a kind of study of the body, of its movement. In this short film, the director shows all the particularities of the body, the back, the legs, the arms and follows the movement. [...]
[...] We showed that Deleuze's theory on the image-movement in Vigo's cinema reveals that the latter uses visual procedures to highlight new dimensions of reality. Notably, he shows that the actions of the characters on land can be uncertain and doomed to failure, while in the water, the bodies let themselves go to their most pure nature, in a more spontaneous and human instinct. Thus, it is easily understood why Vigo marked his time. He came to take the spectator and the entire profession out of their habits, thanks to his audacity, his impertinence and his artistic direction. [...]
[...] Jean Vigo immerses us from the first minutes of the film Zéro de Conduite, in the daily life of adolescents. To recall, here is the detailed description of the film's entry by film critic Florence Jacobwitz in her article 'Zéro de Conduite: radical cinema'49» : « I've always liked the group of four 'delinquents' in Zéro de Conduite, Caussat/Louis Lefebvre (who reappears as the Père Jules's apprentice in L'Atalante), Colin/Gilbert Pruchon, Bruel/Coco Goldstein and the late carpenter and ultimate revolutionary Tabard/Gérard de Bédarieux, before seeing two boys grow up to adolescence, but this only intensifies my admiration for the details so characteristic of the age represented. [...]
[...] Films Vigo, Jean, À propos de Nice, 1930 Vigo, Jean, Zero for Conduct, 1933 Vigo, Jean, La Nation by Jean Taris, 1931 Vigo, Jean, L'Atalante, 1934 Clair, René, Toni, 1935 Leger, Fernand, Le Ballet Mécanique, 1924 Vertov, Dziga, Man with a Movie Camera, 1929 Peainlevé, Jean Chaplin, Charlie Epstein, Jean By the blue sea Duvivier, Julien, La Belle Équipe, 1936 Michel Morgan Chapline, Charlie, The Circus, 1928. Storck, Henri Renoir, Jean Godard, Jean-Luc Dali, Salvador, Un Chien Andalou Delluc, Louis Complementary Bibliography (1960). Sociological Realism in Cinema. Sequences, 10-14. Albèra, F. (2020). Anne Steiner, Revolutionary and Dandy. [...]
