A proposito di Nizza

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.

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.

Jean Vigo is a great example of a young filmmaker who died very young and is adored today by cinema freaks. While the body of his work is minuscule (only four films), in some circles he's considered a genius--even though only one of his films ("L'Atalante") was full-length. And, two of his other three shorts are more experimental films than anything else. I frankly don't quite get his reputation, but for fans of this writer/director, Criterion has released a DVD with all four of his films.

This is Vigo's first film and it shows. In so many ways, it looks as if Vigo was having a blast experimenting with film work. You name the camera technique, he tries it here--with lots of variety--like a film student seeing what they can do with a camera. And, this is exactly what it is--like watching Vigo learn and grow in his craft. Fans of Vigo will salivate--others will be a bit put off by the style of the film as well as the subject matter.

As for the subject, the film is, in some ways, like a silent travelogue about the city of Nice, France. However, at times Vigo appears to make statements concerning the upper classes and working people--but mostly, he just seems to be filming EVERYTHING--and a lot of it is stuff you wouldn't expect to see in such a film--such as washerwomen cleaning sheets and the like. I saw a bit of interest in the film, but an not a Vigo-phile, so I think it's a film best seen by the very devoted...and not the other 99% of us.

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).

Other reviewers have already commented on Vigo's subversive deconstruction of the various narrative requirements and visual iconography of the travelogue format for the purposes of cutting satire, to the point at which we almost forget to view the film on such a level; instead taking it entirely at face value. A Propos de Nice (1930) is a short work, though only twenty minutes shorter than Zéro de conduit (1933), which is an obvious minor masterpiece. Whereas that particular film - as well as the director's final feature, the even greater L'Atlante (1934) - presented captivating images and fragmented ideas backed by traces of character and narrative, the film in question is a purely visual experience. To understand the film we must read deeply into the subtle juxtaposition of the images as they are presented to us, in order to greater appreciate the ideas that Vigo is trying to convey.

As with his second short film, Taris, roi de l'eau (1931), which looked at the daily routine of a synchronised swimmer, A Propos de Nice takes a conventionally bland presentational format and style and transforms it into a pure cinematic event. It is still, in all respects, a small-scale work; one that may confound and disappoint audiences looking for more of the magical realism and pretty evocation of youth and beauty presented by both Zéro de conduit and L'Atlante, though it is worth experiencing purely for Vigo's radical presentation and satirical evaluation of class and the bourgeoisie.