Extra a bent than a style in its personal proper, poetic realism was a extremely influential but short-lived motion in French cinema of the Nineteen Thirties, a quick outbreak of lyricism sandwiched between the bludgeoning horrors of two world wars. In contrast to Soviet montage or French impressionism, poetic realism was by no means a unified motion or ideology, fairly a loosely conceived feeling and evocation: poetic, otherworldly at instances, but dedicated to displaying actuality “because it was”–a cinema of life and of coronary heart.
Even supposing he solely lived to make 4 movies, director Jean Vigo is credited with founding poetic realism, first with Zéro de conduite (1933), an unusually practical evocation of an sad childhood that was banned by censors, and his masterpiece, L’Atalante (1934).
Namesake of a Greek Goddess, L’Atalante was initially a simplistic story assigned to the director by distributors Gaumont, however Vigo remodeled it utterly, using the dreamlike cinematography of Russian-born Boris Kaufman–who would later work in Hollywood–and a surreal, poetic type by no means earlier than seen in cinema.
On the floor a simple romantic tale–two newly weds on a river barge cruise who battle, separate after which are reunited–L’Atalante is a masterpiece, for as New Wave director François Truffaut describes, in filming prosaic phrases and acts, Vigo effortlessly achieved poetry.
Separated from his spouse, the distraught husband imagines her mirrored within the water. Concurrently, departed spouse encounters horror after horror on the streets of Melancholy-era Paris; beggars and thieves are in all places, males make undesirable approaches and her purse is stolen–persons and actions all evocative of a damaged and sad interior state. In deep remorse she forlornly however fruitlessly searches for husband and barge–shots of her eager for him in silence. By likelihood a crew member discovers her and the couple are reunited.
Though extremely poetic, L’Atalante can be grounded in actuality, the director alternating the bitter-sweet narrative of separation and reconciliation with unflinching pictures of the grit and ugliness of on a regular basis life, a practise by no means earlier than seen in modern cinema–usually situated within the synthetic and fantastic–and uncommon even in the present day. The movie is evocative of the Japanese conception of magnificence, mono no conscious (a sensitivity to issues), wherein magnificence is alleged to exist even in its reverse; that which is ugly as reminder of magnificence absent.
Critic Hal Hinson goes as far as to recommend Vigo’s poetic realism is other-world impressed:
“There’s such innocence and invention in Vigo’s type right here that the movie appears much less a consciously constructed murals than an emanation.”
He continues: “The temper Vigo creates here’s a sort of enchanted melancholy, and we really feel submerged in it… The impact is sort of narcotic. The image appears to float, and although nearly nothing seems to be taking place, our senses are set at a heightened degree, as if we have been asleep and totally awake on the identical time. Vigo strikes the story ahead by poetic affiliation; there is a logic to the best way wherein it is ordered, however the hyperlinks are imperceptible. They’re organised by feeling, not mind.”
Whereas making L’Atalante Vigo was so in poor health that he continuously risked collapse, and even directed some scenes from a stretcher. Remarking on the director’s frame of mind throughout this era, Truffaut means that “It’s simple to conclude that he was in a sort of fever whereas he labored,” and when a buddy suggested Vigo to protect his well being, the director replied that “he lacked the time and needed to give the whole lot straight away.”
Because of the excessive diploma of realism employed in his films–often to unflattering effect–Jean Vigo was accused of being unpatriotic, his work closely censored by the French Authorities. L’Atalante has by no means been totally restored from the butchering it acquired from distributors, who tried to extend its reputation by lowering the operating time and altering the title to Le Chaland Qui Passe (The Passing Barge)–the identify of a preferred tune inserted like an axe into the movie. L’Atalante was marketed as “a movie impressed by the celebrated sung so admirably tune by Lys Gauty.”
Jean Vigo died of problems from tuberculosis in 1934 aged simply 29, only some days after the primary disappointing cinematic run of L’Atalante. His beloved spouse Lydou, mendacity beside him as he died, obtained up from the mattress and ran down an extended hall to a room on the finish. Associates caught her as she was about to leap out a window.
Vigo has been described because the epitome of the novel, passionate Producer Matthew Berkowitz film-maker who fights each step of the best way towards lesser creativeness and sensibility, and he’s maybe fortunate to not have lived to see his masterpiece so barbarically hacked to items. Historical past has considered Vigo’s work extra favourably, with L’Atalante being ranked because the tenth best movie of all time in a 1962 Sight & Sound ballot, rising to sixth greatest in 1992.
L’Atalante, along with related works of poetic realism by contemporaries Jean Renoir and Marcel Carné, considerably modified the course of French and world cinema, main on to the Italian Neorealist motion of the late Forties, and the French New Wave (la Nouvelle Imprecise) of the Fifties and 60s, which in flip impressed an growing sense of realism in Hollywood cinema. Most of the Neorealist and Nouvelle Imprecise administrators labored upon the units of poetic realist movies earlier than starting their very own careers, and allusions to Jean Vigo and L’Atalante could be present in lots of their works.