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.

An anarchist world...a surrealist world: they are the same. -Andre Breton Jean Vigos film Ziro de Conduite was banned when first released in 1933, due to potentially incendiary content, and it provoked a near riot at a press gathering that same year. The film, which concerns a rebellion of French boarding school students against their faculty masters, was an emotional and personal undertaking for Jean Vigo, whose anarchist upbringing colored his view on school and authority. As a result, he created a film that was distinctly anti-authoritarian in almost every respect. This paper will argue that Jean Vigo's masterpiece "Zero de Conduite" is a paragon of anti-authoritarian film, because it subverts power and authority at a political and cultural level by targeting not only the antagonists of the film, but eventually, through surrealism, the structure of the film itself. As a result, "Zero de Conduite" became hugely influential to the political and cultural upheaval of 1968, and anticipated many of the theories and actions of the Situationist International, responsible in large part for the student uprisings of May 1968 in Paris. To this day, Vigo's work and its implications remain influential to the modern anarchist movement, which necessitates both political and cultural revolution.