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.

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.

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.

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.