Word: vigo
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...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...
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...
...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...
...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...