L'Atalante

It's good that our Film Club shows old films as well as new ones. One of our most highly rated this season was Buster Keaton's magnificent "The General" from 1926, and now this.What a treat. It may not have been the best film ever made but nearly everyone seems to have thoroughly enjoyed it.

Mind you, if  Juliette had read her Daily Mail she might have known better than to let herself in for all that trouble:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1311263/Proved-Those-marry-haste-DO-repent-leisure.html

Anyway, lots of interesting stuff on-line - I've put links to all these quotes below.

Wikipedia on Jean Vigo:
“Jean Vigo (1905 – 1934) was a French film director, who helped establish poetic realism in film in the 1930s and was a posthumous influence on the French New Wave of the late 1950s and early 1960s.
“Vigo was born to Emily Clero and the prominent Spanish/Catalan militant anarchist Eugeni Bonaventura de Vigo i Sallés (who adopted the name Miguel Almereyda - an anagram of "y'a la merde", which translates as "there's the shit"). Much of his early life was spent on the run with his parents. His father was strangled in his cell in Fresnes Prison on the night of 13 August 1917; allegedly the authorities were responsible. The young Vigo was subsequently sent to boarding school under an assumed name, Jean Sales, to conceal his identity.”

Peter Bradshaw, Guardian (5 stars):
“Vigo was French cinema's genius of Wellesian energy who, in the face of persistent ill health, produced just four films by the time of his death at the age of 29. Remarkably, the entire corpus of his work runs to hardly more than two-and-a-half hours.”

Jamie Russell, BBC:
“Vigo was seriously ill when he made this, his first and last feature. Occasionally forced to direct his actors from a stretcher, he crafts a captivating fairytale about love's ups and downs that's charged with frank eroticism and strange, ethereal majesty.”

Jean Vigo: Artist of the floating world - Graham Fuller (BFI website)
“Jean Vigo’s great work ... was based on a one-page scenario by Jean Guinée ... who had been intrigued by the sight of a woman helming a barge on the Seine, and had named his fictional vessel after a frigate commanded by one of his ancestors in the Seven Years War. Following the banning of Vigo’s Zéro de conduite in 1933, the director’s supportive producer Jacques-Louis Nounez sent him Guinée’s scenario hoping it would deter him from the kind of radical experimentation that had illuminated Vigo’s scabrous 42-minute satire of boarding-school life...'What the fuck do you want me to do with this? It’s Sunday-school stuff,' was Vigo’s response when he read the scenario.”

Film4:
"The filmmaker died before editing was complete after an arduous shoot. The film was then chopped up, rehashed, and renamed by its jittery distributor, and the specially-composed musical track ditched for a pop song of the day. The result pretty much bombed on its first release...The maltreatment of this unique film only served to further solidify his reputation as one of the greatest mythical figures of French cinema."

Wikipedia on Dita Parlo:
“Parlo made her first film appearance in Homecoming in 1928 and quickly became a popular actress in Germany. During the 1930s she moved easily between German and French films, achieving success in films such as L'Atalante (1934) and La Grande Illusion (1937).
“Parlo attempted to establish a career in American films but despite a couple of roles in Hollywood films, was unable to extend her European success. In the late 1930s, she was scheduled to appear in the Orson Welles production of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness for RKO Radio Pictures. However, that project did not come to pass. With the outbreak of World War II, Parlo returned to Germany. She appeared in only three films during the last thirty years of her life, making her final film appearance in 1965.”

The feedback score was 84%, coming in a fraction of a percent higher than Red Dog.

Your comments:

A	Absorbing
A	Lovely, fluid camera-work and use of light and shade. Like a staging post between silent and sound cinema.
A	Wonderful – Thank you
A	It's good to see a classic that was so influential. Many thanks. Zero de Conduite next?
A
A
A
A	Lovely film.
A	Unique! Charming
A	Certainly very well made. I see where a lot of subsequent films got their ideas and techniques  from.
B	Good film. Thanks. Intriguing.
B	Some charming aspects, particularly her wonder at the “new”. Modern for its time.
B	Provocative and thought-provoking.
B	Some lovely visual elements.
B
B	Surprisingly contemporary.
B	Good for the year. Hope things have changed for women.
B	Very different but enjoyed it.
B	Charming and funny. Pere Jules and the cats stole the show.
B	Not sure if it was one of the best films ever made (not as good as “Les Enfants du Paradis” for instance, made a few years later) but very innovative for the time. Very liberal compared with Hollywood movies of the time (couples in same bed, naked photos, black people dancing with white people). Well acted (specially Juliette) & quite funny.
B	Maybe not the best film of all time, but certainly enthralling and absorbing.
B	Historically interesting and “amusante”
B	Really enjoyed it. It was funnier than I expected. More of a comedy than a “romance” really.
B	Interesting
B	Enjoyable but not the best film ever.!
B	A very good film for its age, with some delightful scenes.
B	Couldn't live up to the build-up! The dialogue wasn't very clear.
B	Well maybe not the “best film ever made” but pretty good.
B	Charming and technically proficient for a film made 80 years ago – wouldn't be my greatest film ever made.
D
D	Surprised at the style and quality of the film making compared to a Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers film of the same period.

Other links:

IMDB user rating 7.9 out of 10:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0024844/ 

Rotten Tomatoes – audience rating 89%:
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/latalante/