Zero de Conduite and l' Atalante

NIGHT HAS fallen on a barge moving slowly down a French canal. Its crew, a halfwit body and a hulking old man, are forward with the young captain. His new bride is aft, trying to steer the ungainly boat by its heavy tiller. Her husband crawls back along the catwalk to her; silhouetted half over the water with face upturned his doubled over figure resembles some odd monster coming into the camera. He reaches her; they embrace and tumble to the deck. Their figures in medium close shot are indistinct, but the bridal gown she is still wearing burns white in the surrounding dark.

The second sequence of l'Atalante is typical in this romance, which unites the grotesque and the beautiful in extraordinary poetry. The great majority of romantic works require middle or upper class milieux to treat themes of love, estrangement, longing, and reunion. Jean Vigo's last film finds them inseparable from its proletarian setting. L'Atalante's style is, in fact, so strange and yet so integrated that one must look in his earlier Zero de Conduite (1933) for its sources.

IN Zero small boys at a boarding school, beginning with minor acts of rebellion, eventually take over. They have no particular reason to do so; the school's teachers and officers are somewhat oppressive, but far more grotesque. All their actions indeed seem to spring from very visible eccentricities or deformities. The children likewise act from the nature of their visual appearance. Small and compact, they are energy-filled balls of light (their clothes are dazzling white) which dash around destructively. The adults are purely objects of satire; the kids, devils.

With no depth of characters, Zero is simply cold and bizarre. At one point two of the kids' leaders have occupied a roof and are pelting some adults' smorgasbord below. Vigo cuts from extreme low-angle to extreme high-angle, generating terror and fascination. The distance between the opposed parties, the height of the weaker and the ridiculous helplessnes of the stronger, the antic behavior of both are pure fantasy and, being pure, have no content whatsoever. Zero is sequence of incidents which command one's interest only through their strange imagery and style.

The visual style of l'Atalante is no less cold. The clear way Vigo composes its frames, lights its sets for black-white contrast, and angles his camera on them stylizes the film as strikingly as Zero. But l'Atalante's dramatic structure progressively reveals the secrets of its very full characters. Who could imagine, for example, feeling deeply sympathetic toward the spirit, let alone the form, of Michel Simon (of Botudu)? Yet Vigo puts him in places and relations to other characters and to the camera, which bring us closer and closer to him. Finally the wife goes into his cabin which is filled with souvenirs of the seven seas. Simon's pride as he shows off his precious machines is touching. A little pathetic, he becomes no weaker; Vigo treats his personal peculiarities as a source of strength.

VIGO IS THUS sympathetic in the deepest sense; he takes the most grotesque facets of his people and, by making them beautiful, creates their individual strength. This all happens in motion. The progressive character revelation he achieves by constantly placing characters in different positions and new rooms, is supported by the imagery of journey and development--the barge in the river. The film's easy motion through extremely strange scenes carries it naturally into sequences of pure imagination--the montages of the captain and his wife dreaming of each other after the barge's departure without her has separated them.

Vigo's focus on mental experience is even clearer in a subsequent sequence where the captain, swimming underwater, sees his wife's face. The shifting appearance of his objective surroundings blends with the illusion superimposed on him: his wife is present in both metaphor and fact. The film's last shot does the same through another semi-metaphor for personal experience. The couple reunited, the barge casts off, and Vigo cuts to a very high shot of the barge (from an airplane) which sweeps over it as it sails down river. The shot is a metaphor for their continuing progress, now stabilized by their reunion. At the same time it shows their objective situation--indeed the barge is so fat off that they cannot be seen on it. The shot thus distances us from them as it assures us of their safe progress. Showing their material and their mental situation in one, it lets us understand and love them at the same time.