À propos de Nice

Around the late 20s and early 30s, there was a vogue for 'a day in the life of the city'-type film, which did exactly what it said on the tin; following the city and its inhabitants from dawn to dusk, showing the breathing pulse of great metropoli(sic?). Although supposedly objective documentaries, these were rigidly contrived and structured, and, with the exception of Vertov's THE MAN WITH THE MOVIE CAMERA, generally tedious.

Vigo's short, A PROPOS DE NICE, photographed by Vertov's brother, bears superficial resemblances to this pointless genre. The film follows the day in the life of pleasure resort Nice, from the preparations of cafe staff in the morning, through the activities of the holidaymakers by day, to a nocturnal winding down. In this sense, it is predictably linear.

However, the film is not really like this at all, but a freewheeling melange of distortion, repetition, subversion. The linearity is chopped to bits, replace by extraordinary feats of imagery and montage. The film actually starts with a casino gaming board, and puppets of the typical bourgeois, generally English, holidaymaker, who, along with the chips, are swept aside.

Vigo was the son of an anarchist, and this goading of the bourgeois continues relentlessly, hilariously, apace. Their attempts at unruffled calm are rubbished by the film's dizzying inventiveness. Tilted camera angles mock respectable buildings; unflattering shots of the bourgeois, snoring, bored, flash by at bewildering speed. The rigidity of this society is shown in the geometric grids Vigo imposes, and the continuous references to all kinds of circles (palm trees, railway lines, umbrellas etc.).

Patriarchy is mocked by the ludicrous fetishiation of gangly phallic tumescences, such as tree trunks, or huge chimney stacks. The supposed objectivity of the documentary mode is undermined by the numerous trick effects, which perversely tell a greater truth. A dirty old bourgeois is seen to be mentally undressing the cross-legged women. The recurrent tides, the circularity, the images of destruction and death (monuments, gravestones) all give the lie to the bourgeois myth of escape from reality, and immortality.

The most prominent rupture of this civility is a carnival. Bakhtin once argued that every society allows one day a year for the carnivalesque, in which the topsy-turvy replaces everyday order - hostility and dissatisfaction is assuaged, and order is restored. Doubtless this was the case in real life here, but Vigo refutes this restoration in his film. The destruction is complete. Huge grotesque faces stride mockingly through the streets - the repressed returning - feverish dancing, insane clowning: all supervised and complicit with the police and authority.

But as the montage gathers sinister momentum, the distinctions between the carnivalesque and bourgeois reality blur heavily. The bourgeois resort, with its games, tides, and exotic animals, is compared to the poor quarter, with its gambling, rivulets of presumably urine, and skeletal cats. Objects become subjects and vice versa - a shot of a boat becomes that boat; people looking into the camera become a shot of that cameraman. The cinema is complicit in the bourgeoise spectacle - its dismantling is a hope for the overthrow of the dead, unimaginative bourgeois.

Simple games, such as tennis, become bizarre surrealistic rites. Once our eyes become attuned, everything looks strange - a man opening his cafe seems normal enough, but a man flinging umbrellas at tables is unnerving and odd. The carnival frenzy finally loses its clearcut role and spills into the film's form, disrupting everything in its wake. Goosestepping policemen are linked to lewd cancanning dancers, the one a complete mockery of the other.

Rather than the renewal and continuity of most 'day in the life' films, NICE ends with destruction and fire. And yet it is a refreshing fire, as the hearty laughs at the close suggest. Blow apart repressiveness, and everybody will be laughing. The film is an astonishing, inventive, febrile delight - after 20 minutes, you'll find yourself catching your breath - and itching to hit something.

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.

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.

"A Propos de Nice" is a very fascinating work by the great, avant garde filmmaker Jean Vigo (who sadly died at the young age of 29, with an only four film long career). It's done with tons of style and creativity, and is quite reminiscent of the work of Dziga Vertov (most famous for directing the classic film "Man with a Movie Camera")), so, if you enjoyed any of Vertov's films, you may find this short to be quite interesting.

Unlike your average Vertov film, "A Propos de nice" is surprisingly funny and satirical. If there's one thing we've learned from Vigo's small body of work is that he had a great sense of humor, and it's clearly evident in this film as well as both "Zero for Conduct" and "L'Atalante", and it's pretty impressive that Jean Vigo was able to make such a sharp satire without any dialogue or plot.

But, satirical elements aside, it is a truly fun and wonderful visual experience. So, even if you have no interest into looking into the film's hidden satirical meaning, it's still a very well shot and interesting avant garde work.

I first saw this as part of a school film study in 1960. THEN as I recall, I merely saw a creaky old French travelogue highlighting more or less a day in the life of a town on the French Cote D'Azur that bore less relevance, to ME at least, than the rather staid and somewhat uninspiring biscuits named after it!

I saw A PROPOS DE NICE again some forty years later at a lowly patronised French Film Festival which had been hurridly organised apparently by Sydney University. What I saw THAT night, with the advantage of four decades of life's experiences, was a superbly constructed attack on, or should I say "de-construction" OF - the Bourgois. Vigo, himself an anarchist to his left femur, relentlessly piles on the satire with images of the "respected" upper-class acting anything but respectfully.

Innovative indeed was the cinematography from Boris Kaufman with intentionally tilted aspects of buildings to lessen their grandeur, use of shadow and striking images of the people (love the Brit tourists nursing their fish and chips) as they go about their daily business.

Essential viewing for students of early French cinema.