Jean Vigo and French New Wave
- Written by Robert Adziashvili
Jean Vigo worked as an assistant cameraman for a small company in Nice, France. In the summer of 1929 in Paris, Vigo met Soviet filmmakers Boris and Mikhail Kaufman, the brothers of Dziga Vertov who had completed their famous newsreel-like “Man With a Moviecamera“ in 1929. They decided to work on film project ‘A Propos de Nice.’ which they completed together in 1930. The film they made together was resembling nothing that was coming out of France. Jean Vigo films laid the groundwork for French New Wave.
Jean Vigo:
‘French film director whose blending of lyricism with realism and Surrealism, the whole underlined with a cynical, anarchic approach to life, distinguished him as an original talent. Although he completed only two feature films and one short, Taris (1931), before his early death, his films produced great public reaction. A Jean Vigo Prize is awarded each year in France in memory of the filmmaker whose work is characterized by “independence of spirit and quality of directing.”’ Robert Sklar, History of Cinema,1973
Both are lyrical films about individuals in revolt against social reality. Their intensely personal nature is thought to have influenced the style of poetic realism that characterized French New Wave movement.- Frank Beaver, Film Historian
“Vigo was one of cinema’s finest poets, able to transcend mundane reality with his unique blend of lyricism, wit, sensuality and surrealism… Vigo’s imagery could be fantastic, experimental, grotesquely funny, or dreamily erotic. It was, however, always imaginative and rapturous, imbued with a passion for film.”
– Geoff Andrew, The Director’s Vision
“Vigo’s career was as brief as it was dazzling… His work was neglected after his death, but when it was later rediscovered, it electrified the French New Wave. His influence endures in the work of many younger auteurs.”
– Kristin M. Jones, The Wall Street Journal
I remember Jean Vigo with tenderness and thankfulness, who in my opinion is a father of Modern French Cinema. First New Wave, then what this New Wave has thrown out on the shore, what has left after this wave. Jean Vigo has founded French Cinema, and nobody has gone farther than him, yes, its unfortunate true.
Andrey Tarkovsky, 1983, from “Voyage in Time” by Tonnino Guera
Jean Renoir:
“The truly terrible thing is that everybody has their reasons.”
“A director makes only one movie in his life. Then he breaks it up and makes it again.”
“The foundation of all civilization is loitering.”
All great art is abstract.”
“I considered that the world, and especially the cinema, was burdened with false gods. My task was to overthrow them. Sword in hand, I was ready to consecrate my life to the task. But the false gods are still there. My perseverance during a half-century of cinema has perhaps helped to topple a few of them. It has likewise helped me to discover that some of the gods were real, and had no need to be toppled.”
“Painters know that material needs are relative; and that the satisfactions of the mind are absolute.”
“Among seekers of truth, painters perhaps come closest to discovering the secret of the balance of forces of the universe, and hence of man’s fulfillment.”
“We do not exist through ourselves alone but through the environment that shaped us.”
“He knew now that corruption is inherent in power, and, even worse, stupidity!”
‘The most skilled hand is never anything but the servant of the mind.’
Jean-Luc Godard:
‘I pity the French Cinema because it has no money. I pity the American Cinema because it has no ideas.’
‘All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl.’
‘Photography is truth. The cinema is truth twenty-four times per second.’
‘You don’t make a movie, the movie makes you.’
‘Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.’
‘I write and film history; I don’t make it. One can be a good critic and a moral observer, but one remains professionally detached as a writer and a filmmaker.’
‘We once believed we were auteurs, but we weren’t. We had no idea, really. Film is over. It’s sad nobody is really exploring it. But what to do? And anyway, with mobile phones and everything, everyone is now an auteur.’
‘Three-quarters of directors waste four hours on a shot that requires five minutes of actual directing. I prefer to have five minutes’ work for the crew – and keep the three hours to myself for thought.’
‘When the Holocaust happened, I was 15 years old. My parents kept it a secret from me, despite belonging to the Red Cross. I only found out about it much later. Even today I still feel guilty, because I was an ignoramus between the age of 15 and 25. I am sorry I couldn’t stand up for them.’
‘I prefer to work when there are people against whom I have to struggle.’
‘Cinema is not a series of abstract ideas, but rather the phrasing of moments.’
‘I want to be together with everyone else but stay lonely.’
Roman Polanski:
‘Cinema should make you forget you are sitting in a theater.’
‘I can only say that whatever my life and work have been, I’m not envious of anyone-and this is my biggest satisfaction.’
‘If you have a great passion it seems that the logical thing is to see the fruit of it, and the fruit are children.’
‘My films are the expression of momentary desires. I follow my instincts, but in a disciplined way.’
‘Normal love isn’t interesting. I assure you that it’s incredibly boring.’
‘I never made a film which fully satisfied me.’
Alain Resnais:
The present and the past coexist, but the past shouldn’t be in flashback.
‘I never thought of becoming a director. When I was twelve, the passage from silent film to the talkies had an impact on me – I still watch silent films.’
‘Luck, I never looked to make difficult movies on purpose. You make the films you can make.’
‘So I used formal techniques to make the film more perceptive emotionally.’
Louis Malle:
‘You must find the note, the correct key, for your story. If you find it, everything will work. If you do not, everything will stick out like elbows.’
‘When you are working on a script, the story itself is not difficult. You say this would happen and then this, resulting perhaps in this. And the dialogue you make as true as you can.’
‘Suddenly this idea came to me for a film about incest. It was almost a daydream. I wrote out 60 or 70 pages in a few days. I showed them to friends, got a warm reaction, decided to make the film.’
‘If you have someone on the set for the hair, why would you not have someone for the words?’
‘I think predictability has become the rule and I’m completely the opposite — I like spectators to be disturbed.’
‘It is only when memory is filtered through imagination that the films we make will have real depth.’
‘It is only when memory is filtered through imagination that the films we make will have real depth.’
‘The longer I live, the less I trust ideas, the more I trust emotions.’
‘Memory is not frozen, it’s very much alive, it moves, it changes.’
Filmmakers don’t work for posterity. We create with celluloid and chemical pigments that don’t last very long. They fade away. In 200 years there will be nothing left of our work but dust.
Claude Lelouch:
‘I see a film as a puzzle, with a beginning, middle, and end, but I like to start at the end sometimes.’
‘I sometimes follow people who attract my curiosity in the street for five, ten minutes.’
‘I’ve seen many films and read lots of thrillers – and I’m always disappointed that I can guess the story before the other viewers.’
‘Hollwood creates useful entertainment. There are millions of people on earth who need distraction and American cinema fulfills that function.’
‘The perfect crime is when you push someone to suicide. I once read a study that said everyone in the course of their life has thought of killing someone.’
Jacques Rivette:
‘When you see the films of certain young directors, you get the impression that film history begins for them around 1980.’
‘And I took a long time to appreciate Lynch.’
‘And Twin Peaks, the Film is the craziest film in the history of cinema. I have no idea what happened, I have no idea what I saw, all I know is that I left the theater floating six feet above the ground.’
‘For me, the film has to be incredibly bad to make me want to pack up and leave.’
Claude Chabrol:
‘A woman confronting men is a proper subject, it is inexhaustible.’
‘I’m not pessimistic about people in general, but only about the way they live.’
‘As far as I was concerned, either I was a homosexual or I wasn’t, so making films would change nothing.’
‘We live in an era where pizzas show up faster than the police.’
I am a Communist, certainly, but that doesn’t mean I have to make films about the wheat harvest.
‘There is no new wave, only the sea.’
‘I remember an article, I can’t recall who by, it was after the fall of the Berlin Wall, which said that now the Wall was down, there could be no more class war. Only someone with money could ever say such a thing.’
‘Stupidity is infinitely more fascinating that intelligence. Intelligence has its limits while stupidity has none.’
‘Films with a message just make me laugh.’
To observe a profoundly stupid individual can be very enriching, and that’s why we should never feel contempt for them.
‘You have to accept the fact that sometimes you are the pigeon, and sometimes you are the statue.’