A Propósito 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.

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.

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.

"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.