It is undoubtedly one of the most beautiful scenes in the history of cinema. Separated by the storms of life, two angry newlyweds sleep in two distant rooms, on either side of the big city. At the discretion of the sheets, they think of each other and each indulge in solitary caresses. Their faces are superimposed by the grace of a fade, and it is then as if they were making love at a distance, separated but together, their bodies speckled by the play of nocturnal shadows.
This scene of unprecedented carnal splendor, and of an erotic load inconceivable for the time (the interwar period), is found in Atalante, the first and last feature film that Jean Vigo will ever direct, who will die shortly after its release, on October 5, 1934. An unforgettable, incandescent scene, for which we would give all the production of the time, and even following.
The topicality of restorations marks the return to the big screen of the work of Jean Vigo: only four films made between 1930 and 1934, which contain, like a pocket handkerchief, a whole world of daring and freedom. Son of a famous anarchist (Eugène Bonaventure Vigo, known as Miguel Almereyda), Vigo, child of the century born in 1905 and broke before his thirties, encountered this still new art of cinema, on the switch from silent to talking. In this first half of the 1930s, at the same time as its forms were bubbling, the cinema also saw its industrial base strengthen, against which Vigo, a censored and misunderstood artist, was going to rush headlong. Many have seen the archetype of the juvenile and cursed poet come true in him. This is indeed reflected in his films, which carry the realism of dreams and revolt, and burn with ardent inspiration.
Pact with reality
It all starts with About Nice (1930), a formidable first short film which inaugurates an unprecedented vein: that of the satirical documentary. The portrait of the southern city is constructed in a mosaic of disheveled views, where Vigo and its operator Boris Kaufman multiply angles and adventurous swerves. On the one hand, the bourgeoisie strutting around the Promenade des Anglais: a lady with a high collar that the montage compares to an ostrich, another than a series of fades undone her fur and other clothes, until dawdling naked in the Sun. On the other, the unhealthy alleys of working-class neighborhoods where poor kids frolic, some of them bearing the scars of leprosy. And to conclude, the carnival with its floats whose grotesque figures rhyme with this casual society with such violent disparities.
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