subscribe to this pageIn this article, James Agee writes a review in high praise for Jean Vigo’s daring experimentation and messages of “Zéro de Conduite.” He begins by warning the reader to not watch Vigo’s film if he or she is affronted by experimentation in film and other mediums. He then mentions that the role of Vigo as artist is to simply open the spectator’s eyes a little bit wider. After a quick summary of the plot, Agee decides that full enjoyment of the film depends on the subjective perception of each viewer, and admits that he too shares many of Vigo’s “obsessions for liberty and against authority.” He then relates the ways in which Vigo’s film is a revolutionary expression, namely the lack of any sort of constructed “diagnosis and prescription,” which can be taken to mean linear plot line, as well as the “liberating force” of its whimsical, mischievous, childish humor and trickery. Agee eventually describes what he sees as Vigo’s “trick,” that being the ability to blur the distinctions between objective and subjective, reality and the fantastic, with technical style and innovation. He decides that all the “levels of reality” presented are equal in value, but interconnected, an aesthetic point of poetic perception. He makes a point of stating that he does not take Vigo’s tactics to be unconventional, but rather simply expanding the audience’s concept of film with different strategies. He reinforces the role of the audience as sympathetic to the rebellious boys, who are portrayed sentimentally as creative, wild, beautiful children, while the teachers are portrayed as grotesque caricatures of authority. The article ends as Agee mentions a few of his favorite scenes from the film, particularly the sacrilegious “slurred” motion parade of the boys out of the dormitories, which he likens to the newsreel shots of the liberation of Paris.
Although Agee may have been a biased reviewer, as he shared many of the same political instincts as Jean Vigo, his analysis of the film is nevertheless an excellent description of its subversive, anti-authoritarian tendencies. By pointing out the lack of a cohesively constructed plotline, with a problem and solution, Agee references Vigo’s truest subversive and anti-authoritarian act as not solely the content of the film, which is obviously anti-authority, but structure of the film itself. By producing a film that makes the audience feel uncomfortable about the differences between fantasy, the dreams of children, and the reality of the daily life of the school, Vigo takes an anarchist step towards questioning the basic nature of how we perceive our reality outside of the theater. Additionally, Agee deliberately mentions some of the film’s subversive content, particularly the whimsy of the students, as avowedly anti-establishment, since it is their childish humor and fancy that in fact does disrupt the alumni gathering at the end of the film, leaving the children victorious. Another specific example would be the boys’ parade out of their dormitories, a very anti-Catholic/anti-organized religion parody that subverted social and cultural norms, not just political ones. In general, Vigo's liberating portrayal of childhood instincts directly confronts the rigid, dummy establishment of teachers and adulthood.
Citation: Agee, James. "Films." The Nation. 5 Jul. 1947. 23-25.
unfortunately, I do not have the URL for where I accessed the article, but I do have a pdf copy if you would like me to send it.
This is a short article from the New York Times about the student uprisings in Paris during May 1968 and their lasting effects on French culture and psychology. The title alone, “Barricades of May ’68 Still Divide the French” says a lot about the content, namely that the uprisings were not wholly supported by French society, and that there is a distinct split in between how they are remembered in French society; the Right calls them “the events”, while the Left calls it “the movement.” The article cedes that youth revolt was common throughout the West, but that France was unique in its potential to foment a political revolution, with 10 million striking workers. The article notes how the desire behind May ’68 was unfulfilled, as the right is now in power. It quickly summarizes a chronology of the events, namely that the student uprisings spread out from Nanterre University to the elite Sorbonne, and eventually to the workers of the nation. A former participant in the uprisings says, “the revolution was social not political,” and that while students spoke of revolution they never intended to carry it out. The article also lists the social transformations that French culture has undergone since 1968, and claims that the “anti-authoritarians of the time were fighting against a very different society,” in effect disabling the notion of any future social revolution.
The article provides a useful historical context for the ramifications of the uprisings in 1968, as well as a critique of, essentially, the ambiguity of Vigo’s conclusion to “Zéro de Conduite.” If Paris in May 1968 was a realization of a theory of anarchist pedagogy, its final results were disappointing, because the nation now has a conservative government. The end of Jean Vigo’s film offers an apparent victory, but no steps further than that, something that many anarchists love to do, while not realizing the damage to the credibility of their movement. Perhaps it is for this reason that the protestors of Paris spoke often of revolution in romantic, lofty terms such as the surrealist rebellion presented in Vigo’s film, but in actuality, never attempted to complete that vision because the vision itself was incomplete, a simple specter of the meme that revolution had become in the collective consciousness of French society. Regardless, the article is valuable to my thesis because it challenges the apparent victory of subversive creativity over entrenched power structures, because power always adapts, whereas visions of the revolution have remained anachronistic.
full citation: Erlanger, Steven . "Barricades of May ’68 Still Divide the French - New York Times." The New York Times. 30 Apr. 2008. 30 Nov. 2008 <http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/30/world/europe/30france.html?_r=2&oref=slogin>.
This article starts out with an excellent Introductory Note, in which Vladimir Pozner calls Vigo a rebel, and notes that “he used the camera as a weapon, not an anesthetic.” The article by Kracauer starts out with brief summaries of Vigo’s four films, and then discusses Vigo’s “relation to the screen.” The author makes note of Vigo’s indiscriminate treatment of humyns as related to objects when filmed, particularly in the mise-en-scene of “Atalante.” In this film, Vigo not only uses objects as “silent accomplices of our thoughts and feelings,” but also as a way to ponder the situations where their psychological “influence predominates.” Kracauer makes a brilliant observation that “since increasing intellectual awareness tends to reduce the power of objects over the mind, he logically chooses people who are deeply rooted in the material world” for leading roles. On “Zéro de Conduite,” Kracauer makes a few close-reading analyses, particularly about ways in which Vigo can communicate the feeling of isolation using placement of objects. He also observes that objects “participate in childish play.” Essentially, he argues that the role of the objects in his film was satire.
This article presents a unique micro-perspective on the role of objects in Vigo’s film. It is especially valuable to my thesis because it notes how objects are used for satire, as a method of subversion. Sometimes, objects are also used in combination with mise-en-scene to give off feelings such as isolation, which is especially important because it focuses on the more individual character psychology, something my thesis leaves out but can surely benefit from, by paralleling the isolation of children in school to the institutional oppression of school which indoctrinates children to be competitive, angry, and ultimately anti-social.
full citation: Kracauer, Siegfried; Melnitz, William; Pozner, Vladimir. "Jean Vigo." Hollywood Quarterly. Vol. 2, No. 3 (Apr., 1947). 261-263. University of California Press. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/1209412>.
This article articulates several problems with seeing a film from the eyes of a child as the protagonist, in how most films normally portray their younger characters. Lopate quickly summarizes the plots of two films he sees as distinct in their treatment of child protagonists, and then elaborates on the problems of representation that child-focused films offer. His primary argument is that the narrative generally stays too close to one character’s viewpoint, giving the impression that the director shares every sentiment of the child, and often glibly gives the children the moral upper hand. His second criticism is that children are just vehicles for the adults’ own fantasies of “purity, spontaneity, victimhood, and indomitability,” preventing the audience from seeing the situation objectively. Finally, he mentions how camera focus on one character results in a narrow-minded, claustrophobic portrayal of the outside world rather than the expansive, objective film should, in theory, present. He also mentions briefly how children are commonly grouped as simple emblems of joy or martyrdom.
Lopate brings up many interesting points, several of which are relevant to Vigo’s film, and several of which Vigo actively goes against. For example, Vigo willfully and consciously gives his children the moral upper hand, because for him, the children represent a pointed opposition to the adult concept and possession of power, one that they can battle with whimsy, playfulness, imagination, creativity, and dream. However, Lopate’s second argument that children are simply vehicles for the adults’ own fantasies of “spontaneity and indomitability” is a very valid point which challenges my thesis quite excellently. If an adult such as Vigo is still the one writing and directing the film, is the film not just a portrayal of adult fantasies, rather than children’s? Even Agee agreed that the children in the film were not a comprehensive view of all childhood. Perhaps the adult behind the camera is using the children as a vanguard for his own conception of a revolution? Vigo, however, has a noted personal and emotional stake in the filmmaking. As an anti-authoritarian, he believes that the school system can only be opposed by those who are subject to its prison-hold on their imagination, the children, of whom he identifies with most, because of their symbol as oppressed which he empathizes with both personally and politically.
full citation: Phillip Lopate. "When the 'I' In a Film Is a Child's." New York Times (16 Mar. 1997): 13. EBSCO MegaFILE. EBSCO. University of Pennsylvania Van Pelt Library, Philadelphia, PA. 2 Dec. 2008 .
This article explicitly analyzes Vigo’s two feature films and If… in the context of anarchism. It is a very useful reference because it provides potentially all of the political analysis of the film in the context of older and contemporary anarchist theory. It discusses how Vigo’s film was ahead of its time in anarchist theory, specifically by likening school to a prison, which anticipated the works of Ivan Illich, Michel Foucault, and Paul Goodman, among others. It also provides historical context, such that the French boarding schools of the era were often built like prisons. The entire article essentially posits the film as an example of anarchist pedagogy.
This source is crucial to my hypothesis, mostly for the dichotomy it delineates more fully between schools and prisons, and the fact that it deals almost explicitly with the relationships between the film and theoretical anarchist pedagogy. Evidently, this portrayal of a children’s rebellion in school is what many anarchists would see as testing ground for a new social order, where the creative spontaneity of children is equivalent to collective social desire, which is repressed by authority figures. The article sees the possibility of liberation with creativity in school as a model for the anarchist notion of collective liberation throughout society, ultimately hailing children as those with the potential to create a new social order. An interesting viewpoint from the article is that it mentions the director’s care to avoid fetishizing childhood innocence as in the Victorian era by making the children into spontaneous troublemakers. These troublemakers thus reject the less-radical notion of “children’s rights” that was trumpeted by a few almost-anarchist theorists of the time because they reject the law itself, firmly cementing this film’s reflection of the most radically individualist anarchist ideas of the era. Finally, the article discusses the open-ended conclusion of the film as the most potentially radical act of all. It leaves open the question of whether the alternative, after the children’s rebellion, is some alternative educational structure with a new form of hierarchy populated by kids, or whether the children scampering off into the distance represent deschooling, and a praise for the wild, creative instincts of children. Either way, the film’s inconclusiveness allows the spectator and characters in the film to decide for themselves, a decidedly anarchist move.
This article summarizes the periods of “historical avant-gardes” in film history. Specifically, it discusses modernism as having three “coordinates”: official art of aristocratic regimes, new technology and industrial revolution’s impact on film, and the hope of social revolution. He then goes on to claim that the film theory of such movements was expressed in both written and filmic manifestos, the latter of which he offers “Zéro de Conduite” as an example. He describes how avant-garde films were labeled such not only because of their unconventional aesthetics, but also their independent modes of production. He then divides up avant garde into three distinct movements: Impressionism, Pure Cinema, and Surrealism. However, within the avant garde there were two distinct tendencies to achieve either a high autotelic form, or a low form that attacked art establishment. He goes on to describe surrealism as a way to link moving images with metaphorical process of automatism, the actual functioning of thought. He also mentions the Surrealist’s praise of the subversive, anarchic undercurrents in slapstick films. Finally, he discusses the potential to liberate the repressed by combining dichotomous elements of fantasy and mundane reality. By using certain cinematic techniques, Surrealists not only represented dream but also mimicked its internal structuration. Surrealists had faith in the ability of film to unleash the “liberating energies of the Unconscious.” He then discusses the Surrealist opinion of cinema as close to a dream itself, and goes on to mention many post-modernist theorists of the “dream state.”
This article is a valuable addition to my thesis, because it provides more background on the artistic movements surrounding Vigo’s film, and how exactly he belonged to some and distinguished himself from many others. It is interesting that the author sees “Zéro” as a filmic manifesto, as its surreal opposition to and victory over the “establishment” adults in the film, and the historical context of it’s controversy and prohibition by the government would certainly support that qualification. The article’s description of the pure energy and creative force of slapstick-like humor as a threat to the establishment is very relevant to Vigo’s film, as the children’s activities and the film’s techniques exude a kind of creative, imaginative energy that eventually topples the authority of the school. The humorous, mischievous tendencies of the children are directly paralleled to the unimaginative, boring, stuffy old teachers who hardly ever smile (save Huguet). It is important to note, however, while discussing slapstick as a threat to the establishment that in the film, a “renegade” teacher named Huguet (who wears a different color coat than the rest of the teachers) plays a part in inciting this student rebellion by indulging and encouraging their silliness with imitations of Charlie Chaplin playing the Tramp in the schoolyard, or classes where he teaches standing on his head. Slapstick plays a large role in fomenting the student revolt, and it is this humor that laughed in the face of such contemporary serious crises in authority around the world, such as the Great Depression, which anarchists saw as a crisis in capitalism, one they were all-too-willing to poke fun at. There is more to discuss about Surrealism, in a later post.
Stam, Robert. "The Historical Avant-Gardes." Film Theory. New York University: New York. Blackwell Publishing, 2000. 55-58.
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This article, published a few years after the US release of “Zéro de Conduite,” provides a valuable historical account of Vigo as a person and director, written by a close friend and colleague. It quickly mentions that Vigo, like all geniuses, was shunned by mainstream society before being (posthumously) lauded for his brilliance. Zilzer argues that Vigo’s life of hardship influences his films by creating a “poetry of realism” on the screen, thus taking a much less political and more aesthetic analysis of his work. He mentions how Vigo’s work was never technically perfect, but never suffered from that fact either. He then summarizes Vigo’s political heritage, all the way back to his anti-war grandfather, who was assassinated under similar circumstances as his father was. He describes Vigo’s character as a blend of the energy of his lineage with the “carefreeness” of his Basque relatives in Pyrenees. After discussing the start of his film career, Zilzer makes an insightful observation that, while filming a documentary of Nice, Vigo shot the “boredom of the rich and the enthusiasm of the poor.” Zilzer then describes the public reception of “Zéro de Conduite,” which was controversial to say the least. In fact, during the screening the lights were turned on several times and a few open fights broke out. Most interestingly, the author points out that although parts of the film could be “called surrealistic…Vigo was never considered a surrealist-his search for realism was too deep.” The article ends with a lengthy description of the production of Vigo’s final film, “L’Atalante.”
Much of this article is useful for my thesis, particularly the personal recollection and historical accuracy it presents. By giving a more detailed description of his heritage, he solidifies the notion that Vigo’s works are strongly motivated by his anti-authoritarian upbringing. However, his description of the film as poetic realism (as opposed to surrealism) challenges my thesis. I would argue, however, that poetic realism was a tendency rather than a movement, as many others have said, and that as such, his surrealistic touches simply add to the poetry of the realism that he is portraying, by focusing on school administration from children’s eyes. I believe that “Zéro de Conduite” achieved Vigo’s search for realism by portraying more than simply superficial aspects of the oppression in school; his use of the surreal allows the audience to empathize with the children in a way that enhances their reality, ultimately creating an absolutely-realistic film, by opening up new perspectives on a recognizable institution.
full citation: Zilzer, Gyula. "Remembrances of Jean Vigo." Hollywood Quarterly. Vol. 3, No. 2 (Winter, 1947-1948). 125-128. University of California Press. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/1209357>.