Background
Vigo was born to Emily Clero and the prominent Catalan militant anarchist Eugeni Bonaventura de Vigo i Sallés, (who adopted the name Miguel Almereyda—an anagram of "y'a la merde", which translates as "there's shit").
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Vigo was born to Emily Clero and the prominent Catalan militant anarchist Eugeni Bonaventura de Vigo i Sallés, (who adopted the name Miguel Almereyda—an anagram of "y'a la merde", which translates as "there's shit").
Much of Jean's early life was spent on the run with his parents. His father was imprisoned and murdered in Fresnes Prison on 13 August 1917. Some speculated that Almereyda was hushed up by order of extreme Socialist politicians, Malvy and Caillaux, men later punished for war-time treason. The young Vigo was subsequently sent to boarding school under an assumed name, Jean Sales, to conceal his identity.
But it is still mysterious that the poignancy of Vigo’s career has been treated lightly. He is the first young martvr to “cinema,” and it is not clear why his fame should have suffered when his selfconsuming devotion to film has become increasingly current among young people. There is a prize named after him in France, and there could equally be film schools pledged to his example. Vigo needed film, and died in its pursuit.
Biography, therefore, is worth spelling out, and we are lucky to have the thorough life by P. E. Salles Gomes. Vigo was the son of the French anarchist known as “Miguel Almereyda.” That led him into politics and the first potent sense of outrage when Almereyda died in mysterious circumstances in Fresnes prison in 1917, and Vigo was taken south to be educated. He returned to Paris at age nineteen, to study at the Sorbonne, but soon succumbed to illness that was to hinder him for the rest of his life. It was while in a tubercular clinic that he met his future wife, “Lydou,” Elisabeth Lozinska. He had already been encouraged by Autant-Lara and worked as assistant to the photographer Léonce-Henry Burel. But in 1929, his father-in-law loaned or gave him money with which he bought a camera and made A propos do Nice, with the aid of photographer Boris Kaufman, younger brother of Dziga Vertov.
Vigo now had four years to live, and he spent them in beleaguered communion with Lydou, Kaufman, and his camera. He and his wife had bouts of illness: he was forced to sell the camera for money to live on; none of his films prospered. Germaine Dulac helped him to set up the documentary on the French swimmer, jean Taris. Jacques-Louis Nounez financed Zéro do Conduite, which caused such a controversy that it was banned. Finally, Vigo made his only feature, L’Atalante, again with Nounez's support and Gaumonts backing. But the distributor took fright at its intensity and released a “popularized” version. Vigo was too ill to contest the matter actively and within months he w'as dead.
The sequence of Vigo's work is of anger being replaced by tenderness, and of his poetic surrealism moving from social survey to the realization of states of mind. A propos do Nice was undoubtedly influenced by Dziga Vertov's newsreel eulogies of Bolshevik Russia. But whereas Vertov’s lyricism is based in the hoped-for harmony between the movie man and a rejuvenated society-, Vigo's love of the visual is turned toward a satire of the Côte d’Azur playground. À propos do Nice is startlingly modem: as with all important satire, the object ol attack is enduring. The neurotic sunning of themselves of the rich and w'ould-be rich beside a stagnant Mediterranean was already noticed in Vigo’s inquisitive documentary. There is an admirable, hostile iron)- in the way his dissolves strip down an idle young woman as she sits cross-legged at a table in the sun. Above all, the camerawork is strolling, intimate, and liberated.
There was ample reason in Vigo's life for such antipathy toward the pleasure-seeking bourgeois. Taris was something of a diversion, an exercise in camera effects on an isolated subject, which nevertheless allowed Vigo to discover one of his most pregnant images, the underwater swimmer. All of his own wretched schooling was avenged in Zero de Conduite, forty-four minutes of sustained, if roughly shot, anarchist crescendo. The attempt by society to regiment raw childhood, and the failure of the attempt, are conveyed bv the very tender high-angle photography. What still impresses about Zéro is the vivid characterization of midget, straw-doll, or macabre authorities, and the engaging spontaneity of the children, very truthful to their private language, their casual fierceness, and the unflawed love that can exist between them.
That new warmth is at the heart of LAtalante, a very simple story assigned to Vigo by Gaumont: a young skipper takes a wife and installs her on the roaming barge he works with an older man, 11lies; the marriage falters and, in Paris, the wife runs away; but separation weighs on them and they are reunited. The distributor coarsened the love story, but in recent years the film has been restored. In addition, LAtalante is a piece of working-class cinema: the harsh Seine towns and the barge life are shown without flinching and with a human directness that deflates such films as Ruttmann’s Berlin and is an advance on Dziga Vertov.
At the same time, Vigo gave LAtalante an imaginary, dreamlike setting: the river is the (low of life; the barge a human island; and Paris the universal city. Godard's delight in making Paris an imaginary city was felt years before by Vigo, lint, most important, LAtalante is about a more profound attitude to love than Gaumont understood. It is love without spoken explanation, unaffected by sentimental songs; but love as a mysterious, passionate affinity between inarticulate human animals. A fairy tale about plain, even ugly people, its intensity' is always to be found in its images: of Michel Simon, an exotic tattooed figure in the cramped cabin; of the bride leaning uncertainly against the tiller of the barge; and of Jean Daste swimming underwater in search of his lost love.
The achievement was already enormous; but his nature was too prone to pain and disaster to survive. He was too deliberately an extremist to find a safe place in the French film industry, much less one advancing on war. Vigo’s vulnerable sensibility emphasizes Bunuel’s greater calm and robustness. But Vigo has been a primary influence on French cinema, especially on Truffaut; and If is a conscious tribute to Zero do Conduite. Every film student scraping together money for a hopelessly unsalable project is following a hard path that Vigo pioneered.
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