À propos de Nice

Disguised as a travelogue of Nice (in only images, without a single narration or title card), Vigo presents us with some of the most extraordinairy images you'll ever see.

On top of what was inspired observation (just pointing his camera at everyday things and making them look new, as if we've never seen them fore, Vigo was boundlessly inventive. Through simple slow motion, or fast motion, certain sequences are made magical (a procession, a bunch of girls dancing), through editing Vigo makes things disappear and appear, and change shape and appearance. His real magic, though, was in camera angles.

Apropos de Nice is one of the most exciting things i've ever seen. If you've seen Zero de Conduite and L'Atalante, the only two features Vigo completed before his premature death at 29, like me, you won't be able to help yourself from seeking out this little treasure, sadly only 25 mins long.

What was such a joy about Vigo was his wide-eyed wonder at the medium. Like Truffaut, Vigo had a boundless passion for movies as a boy, and at one point he saved up enough money to buy a camera, and he went out on the town in Nice and what we see in this movie is the result. Just Vigo standing there with a camera filming things, and the results are breathtaking. Just the look of things... the shapes of things, becomes illuminated by Vigo's curious camera. Vigo goes dancing on a crowded ballroom with his camera, watches sunbathers with it, watches passersby on the beachside, and watches a man reading a private letter over his shoulder, watches trees blowing in the wind, different men laughing, and much more i'll leave for you to discover. But its not the things themselves, its the way they are looked at - the camera angles, the way the camera moves around them. Vigo's lesson is that words are impotent, but images are magic.

Well, this is great if you're looking for revolutionary film, not by our disillusioned standards, but from a time when it was thought it could change the world. It failed that but it changed the way we see and dream.

So, I've been following threads of that revolution, the revolutionary eye that does not merely see, the way audiences 'saw' live theater, but floats into space it constructs. One such I have found in Russia and followed the Ermoliev trail. I cover aspects of that in my posts about Ivan Mozzhukhin.

Another thread is Epstein and later Kirsanoff, both radical makers, both émigrés from the edges of a gone Empire. Also covered here.

Another intersects right here, it's a great find if you're attuned to the great experiments of the silent era. It will astonish you by sheer inventiveness, I guarantee. It can travel you.

We know it now because it's one of few utterances in film of a man who would have been another Fellini, the legend goes. He was a natural poet but lacked images, or a way to capture them, a way to realize vision. So he teamed up with a young Russian behind the camera then studying in Sorbonne, no ordinary émigré this one.

Now this young Russian guy had two brothers back home, fervent revolutionaries and were dabbling in cinema themselves. They were doing some pretty cool, pretty radical things between them. One account says how young Boris - the name of our guy - was kept up-to-date of revolutionary advances of his brothers via mail. Another account reveals that elder brother Denis had been in Paris in 1929, the year he made his seminal work. The two brothers would have got in touch, perhaps that film was screened, perhaps it astonished young Boris.

His brothers were geniuses. You will know Denis Kaufman by the alias Dziga Vertov. Mikhail was his right-hand man and a director himself - look out for Moscow from '27.

And let's not forget, Jean Epstein was giving lectures at Sorbonne. At any rate, Boris could not have been oblivious to the young medium being reshaped around the world, going beyond theatre. He could not fail to recognize that Jean Vigo wanted to work in this field.

So anyway, you may know that Vigo was a young poet born into anarchists. You may appreciate that anarchism then was not what it is now. You may even remember that anarchists were in Lenin's first provisional government, an astonishing thing for contemporary times (but quickly removed to consolidate power). So when Vigo sets out to film what was called a 'city symphony' at those times, Nice was not randomly selected. This is where complacent class enemies lounge half-asleep in the sun, oblivious to the sardonic camera. This is where tourists saunter in the promenade, healthy, satisfied, whole. Where sex beckons.

And on the other side of the city, the poor quarters, the workers, the impotentwatchers.

So in agitprop terms the Soviets favored, this has bite and gleeful irony to spare. We are shown miniature palm trees and a miniature train contrasted with the real things.

But it would be nothing, nothing at all, without the camera seeing the way it does.

Vertov's theory, rooted in Marxist dialectics, was of a 'cine-truth' that is possible as man goes beyond thought, beyond meddlesome conventional thought about things, and shifts gears into precise only-seeing that is, in itself, present action. You should know that this is a key insight in Buddhism, well preserved in teachings about mindful meditation.

So seeing clearly and without dramatic aftereffects. We get a camera that floats, has an airy quality, regular readers will know I've been following patterns in this type. The 'cine-truth', as it were, is not to be found in the political direction of the gaze, this is only another layer of meddlesome thought that gets in the way, but in the very fact that we are seeing people as they lounged, as they played tennis, waves as they washed the shore clean.

Forget this is an anarchist's poem. Let the Buddhist floating world wash over you. Let this just be about planets in their orbits.

... working in collaboration with Boris Kaufman. The film presents a travelogue-esque look at the French coastal city of Nice, with its wealthy vacationers and sunbathers, as well as the working class and poor hidden away in the back streets. Less a condemnation and more of a snarky poke in the eye, the movie juxtaposes images of slowly baking sun worshipers with those of alligators, the pompous and ostentatiously dressed aristocracy with the street cleaner picking up after them, and a raucous celebration and gaudy parade with a cemetery and a smokestack rendering all things to smoke and ash.

Kaufman was the brother of famed Soviet director Dziga Vertov, and he shows some of the same cinematic inventiveness and an eye for the carefully chosen shot. This was the debut effort from Jean Vigo, who would go on to make two more shorts, and the classic 1934 feature L'Atalante, before dying at age 29 after a brief illness, destined to become a tragic hero and one of the great "what if's" in French cinematic history.

What starts off as a conventional travelogue turns into a satirical portrait of the town of Nice on the French Cote d'Azur, especially its wealthy inhabitants.

This is a subversive silent film inspired by Bolshevik newsreels which considered social inequity in 1920s Nice. Vigo himself said, "In this film, by showing certain basic aspects of a city, a way of life is put on trial... the last gasps of a society so lost in its escapism that it sickens you and makes you sympathetic to a revolutionary solution." Historically, the film is interesting not just for its class commentary, but for the involvement of Boris Kaufman, who was a virtual unknown before working as a cinematographer on "On the Waterfront" (1954).

Even that Jean Vigo's production is one of the smallest ones in the history of cinema, many film historians see him as one of the greatest filmmaker ever lived. He only had the time to make four films before his death in 1934, two of them are very well known. Zéro de conduite: Jeunes diables au collège (1933) and L'Atalante (1934), the latter is often seen as the most beautiful film ever made. It's also his only full lenght film. The other two films by him are a bit more rare, a documentary about the winning swimmer, Jean Taris: Jean Taris, Swimming Champion (1931) and his first film À propos de Nice (1930). The film is about a French coastal town - it is amazing how someone cann tell everything in less than a half an hour.

It's hard to picture anyone else to make this film, but Jean Vigo. He knows just where to put the camera and when. À propos de Nice is a very intense portrait of a city, colored with black humor. It basically shows social injustice that lies in the city of pleasures. There are many lyrical realizations in À propos de Nice, for instance the gambling, the sea and the shore. The documentary plays very beautifully like a poem, like Francois Truffaut has said "Jean Vigo effortlessly reached poetry". But the lyricism isn't the only poetic thing in À propos de Nice, it has also got poetic realism and surrealistic visions.

The gambling shown in À propos de Nice is actually very interesting, why is it shown? I've read somewhere interpretations, which say that it shows the economical order, which is based on coincidence, cheating and inhumanity. The antithesis of the richness and poverty is one of the most interesting things in this film. Somewhere in the city people crafts products with their hands, they still have the touch to their products to their work. But then Jean Vigo shows the other side, the Nizza of gambling places and carnivals, where the moral and mental death lies.