Word: vigo
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
There are those who will find it hard to believe that a revolt staged by a handful of schoolboys could provide material for anything but a romping farce. Such people will be rather harshly surprised by Jean Vigo's Zero de Conduite, a searing film that uses a pillow fight and other boyish escapades to create a macabre, half-real world of hatred and rebellion...
...Vigo gives substance to the students' dream of taking over school, by distorting every scene in just the way that a young, mistreated boy might have imagined it. He uses every camera trick he can to tear us loose from reality. At the same time, he includes so many convincing incidents that it is impossible not to believe in the reality of the dream. He destroys verisimilitude but makes fantasy so credible that I quickly stopped smiling at a puerile conspiracy and began to shudder at the vividness of a revolt prompted by deep injustices and carried out with alarming...
...find it exceedingly difficult to characterize Vigo's method of treating dreams and reality. It does not resemble Bergman's use of symbolism, Freudian or otherwise, and it is nothing like the way Jean Genet handles many layers of illusion. Rather, Vigo deliberately distorts his story, visually and dramatically. He injects the outre in the form of a headmaster who is three feet tall and a drawing that comes to life, and he slants his scenario so that the children win. Still, he never departs far enough from normal experience to enter the surreal, and this is precisely what makes...
This sequence exemplifies Vigo's approach throughout the film. He takes a pillow fight, a normal event in a dorm of twelve-year-olds, and transforms it into a fierce and successful weapon against authority. Then he cuts all this furious activity to a halt and momentarily renders it quite unreal. The pace of the slow-motion section underlines the wildness of the fight and its stylization makes the preposterous pillow victory seem very real by contrast...