Jean Vigo (review)

Michael Temple's Jean Vigo is an addition to be warmly welcomed to this still expanding series. It helps to open up the series to 'classical' French film while engaging with a figure who, despite his early death, is one of the legendary names in cinema. The book is written out of enthusiasm for the director, thus avoiding the dryness that sometimes dogs academic writing on film. Yet its cinephilia is profitably tempered by academic rigour, attention to detail and detached analysis. It takes a rounded and systematic approach to its subject, beginning with Vigo's life and career, proceeding with the lesser known film (Taris) and the three great ones (A propos de Nice, Zéro de conduite and L'Atalante) before finally examining the Vigo myth. Given Vigo's antecedents — his father was the celebrated anarchist Almereyda — and the intensity with which he lived his short life, the biographical elements are never less than interesting and cast real light on the films. Analysis of the latter is accompanied by highly informed discussion of the circumstances of their production and reception that ties them into the broader context of the French film industry while underscoring the range of obstacles faced by a radically original, politically committed filmmaker. The analysis itself is always clear, perceptive and persuasive but sometimes a little cramped by a systematic, section-by-section approach to each film that proves very productive for the shorter works but perhaps a little too painstaking for the longer L'Atalante. This reader found himself wanting something more flexible that would allow thematic and stylistic patterns greater development. Notwithstanding, the book is highly persuasive in its explanation of how Vigo and his 'band' opened out L'Atalante's originally trite and conservative story to produce a luminously non-conformist film. The final chapter explores the Vigo myth, convincingly accounting for the director's centrality within the French cinematic imaginary and his influence on other key figures. If there is a limitation here, it is in the rather dismissive attitude towards the libertarian left. If Vigo was, as Temple notes, enormously important to the generation of 1968, it would be have been nice to have learnt more of how it received and responded to his work. Instead the political dimension of the myth is rather too quickly disposed of to allow the cinephilic full rein. Temple's book is none the less an important addition to the literature on Vigo and will almost certainly be the standard reference in English for some time to come, making an excellent complement to the outstanding Artificial Eye DVD of the complete works that is thankfully now available.