User:Loeba/sandbox2

Story

• MW 11: Barge travels down the canal between La Havre and Corbeil, south of Paris. It then goes back to La Havre via the docks at La Villette.
• MW 16: Jean holds a delivery job with the canal freight company. He is not from Juliette's village.

Script/development

• MW 9: Jean Guinée was a pseudonym for Roger de Guichen
• ME 13: Guinee may have been influenced by Puccini's opera Il Tabarro. Similar story.
• MW 73: Guinee left the script in an archive for 2 years. Louis Nounez then picked it out and encouraged Vigo to use it. Vigo had been considering making a story of hoboes and convicts, but Nounez discouraged him because Zero de Condiute had been banned. Nounez was a fan of Chaplin, Clair and Renoir, and liked that Vigo was similarly comic, poignant and surreal,
• MW 9: When shown the script, Vigo said "What the fuck do you want me to do with this? It's Sunday school stuff."
• MW 13: Calls the original "gloomy moralising".
• MW 10: His friend Albert Riéra told Vigo something could be made out of the script. Vigo and Riera revised the original.
• MW 13: Guinee's original had the film end with the words "But happiness had left the ship". Vigo changed it to a purely happy ending. A "complete transformation of pessimism into hope."

Production

• MW 70-71: Many of the crew were already associated with Vigo.
• MW 73: The cast and crew were mostly young, optimistic and opinionated.
• MW 71: Simon was introduced to Vigo thru Riera, and became interested.
• MW 74: Filming was held back by delays. Took place from Nov '33 to Jan '34. Cold winter, canals were iced over.
• MW 72: Vigo gave the crew freedom.
• MW 72: Kaufman said Vigo was willing to adapt, and change the narrative to fit given conditions.
• MW 72: Vigo & Simon created Pere Jules from stories of Simon's background. Simon was allowed to improvise - he disliked retakes, so Vigo allowed him to do one-takes (rare).
• MW 72: Dita Parlo comment on Vigo: "Vigo let himself be surprised by life itself, by the scenes which came together, by the actors, the text, the light and what he saw ... we were completely free, in the middle of keeping an eye out all the time on Vigo to know whether, yes or no, that was it."
• MW 73: Vigo was very ill, sometimes directed from a stretcher. Had intermittent abcenses, but filming continued.
• MW 70: The budget ran out, and they had no money to pay actors for the final scene. p. 71: Suggests the crew put money together? Pierre and Jacques Prévert entertained the crowd throughout the night.

Post production

• MW 74: Vigo was exhausted after filming, and went to mountains with wife for a month. Edited by Louis Chavace in Paris. Vigo joined him in March, to try and be there for the final stages, but was still too ill. Not known whether or not Vigo saw the final cut.

Release

• MW 74: First screened for Gaumont, the crew and the trade. Some say Vigo was there, others say not (view footnote).
• MW 74: Distributed demanded changes thinking it wouldn't be popular. Vigo and Chavance approved some cuts, including a shoplifting scene.
• MW 74: Opened at the Gaumont cinema in Paris on 25 April (day befiore Vigo's 24th b-day). Poorly received, so Gaumont ask for more changes.
• MW 75: Uncut version was screened at Venice festival in July, without much attention.
• MW 74: Was renamed to 'Le Chaland qui passe', the name of a popular ballad by Lys Gauty. The song was dubbed over the credits (p. 75)
• MW 75: Cut from 89 to 65 minutes. Seems that the crew allowed this to happen, but there's some diagreement about whether Vigo fully consented.
• MW 75: The cut version opened in September, with good reviews but was a commercial failure and closed after 3 weeks.
• MW 75: Vigo dies October 5, from septicaemia.
• MW 75: In December the uncut version was shown at London Film Festival. Good reviews. This print was given to the BFI. Shown again in September 1943, well received.
• MW 75: 1988: David Meeker of BFI notices difference in prints.
• MW 75: In 1989 three different versions were studied/combined/re-edited/ Restored cost 1.5 million francs. Still had some mould damage, not all dialogue could be heard.
• MW 75: New version released in 1990.

Filming/cinematography

• MW 10: Vigo admired René Clair, who believed that cinema was dependent on visuals.
• MW 15: Boris Kaufman was lighting cameraman on all Vigo's films. He handles shape "through light and shadow".
• MW 15: Light bouncing off water is one of Vigo's main artistic characteristics. Used in the first shot.
• MW 11: "realist vision of the moving camera, in a flow of unselfconscious, unaffected, fluent images"
• MW 12: The camera is never used as a person's viewpoint. It is used to create images, "not to enter the subjectivity of a character; the image then carries the mood, the meaning, the impact of a scene, not the imputed feelings of one of the participants." Talks of the camera's "independence" and "autonomy". It "maintains a formal difference". "This freedom allows Vigo many registers of feeling."
  • This is rare, most films try to keep the character in line with a character's POV (p. 13).
• MW 18: Sally Potter says Vigo used a depth-of-field borrowed from Eisenstein, one that creates a "metaphysical dimension". Figures move in an expressive way.
• MW 18: The "clarity of formal arrangement" seems to be influenced by still photographers of the early century.

Love

• MW 9-10: Calls it a "banal story". "in content nothing special, in structure predictable". But says the "thinness" of the story should not be confused with the unremarkable.
• MW 10: "one of the most tender and convincing love stories on film"
• MW 11: "a traditional romance" but one that (p. 13) "represents a turning away from romanticism."
• MW 11: Lovers learn "the depths of their need and their passion for each other." A "tale of erotic suffering".
• MW 11: Highlights the differences between them: she is gentle, he is rough; she wants to explore the world, he has closed it off. Difficulties between them: his impatience, she is vulnerable to temptation, he can't handle her volatility.
• MW 12: The films avoids sentimentality by being inventive, through an ironic juxtaposition of happy music and painful experiences, and "a quality of sincere innocence".
• MW 70: "lovely, light-hearted, poignant shimmer of its love story"
• MW 76: "a story of imagination and pleasure, of passion and loss."
• MW 76: Suggests Vigo understood Jean's fear of losing Juliette's due to his wife's illness. "the shadow of mortality infuses his knowledge of love. Felt misery and bliss lift the usual tale of erotic suffering into a realm of urgent, precise, experimental honesty about what he, Vigo, values and what he desires, and through his images we in the audience experience it too."

Women

• MW 15: Identifies a theme about women, where they chose to be, where they are contained.

Gritty

• MW 11: "manifest world, in the interior, domestic details of work and the unadorned scenery of industrial labour."
• MW 11: Truffaut said its a film "whose feet smell".
• MW 15: "smoky, damn winter of the canals"; a "moody, austere aesthetic"; doesn't sentimentalise working life.

Surrealism

• MW 70: Vigo is an auteur > "on the evidence of his idiosyncratic work, its original humour and fantasy"
• MW 12: It is Vigo's "combination of fantasy and naturalness" that has stopped L'Atalante from being sentimental and trite.
• MW 11: It doesn't separate the serious from the comical, or the physical from the metaphysical. The story is tole through humour, dreams fantasy, mischievous wit, songs, improvisation.
• MW: 13: Film has many "mysterious images, non-sequiturs and peculiar moments."
• MW 15: The wedding procession has an absurdity to it, and seems to be a social satire. Bowler hats were a popular symbol with surrealists.
• MW 18: Films opens with "a peculiar, lugubrious sense of menace".

Contemporary reception

• MW 11: The style and feel of the film was unfamiliar, which made it unpopular when released. Georges de La Fouchardiere (anarchist and writer, friend of Vigo's dad) is reported to have called it "lavatory flushings".
• MW 10: One of the only critics to appreciate it from its release was John Grierson (In Cinema Quarterly, august 1934). He wrote: "[Vigo] tells it in a style peculiar to himself. It is an exciting style. At the base of it is a sense of documentary realism which makes the barge a real barge ... But on top of the realism is a crazy Vigo world of symbols and magic ... It is a novel and fascinating way of story-telling, and Vigo is clearly one of the most imaginative young directors in Europe."

Acclaim

• MW 17: Director Sally Potter picked it as one of her top 10 films in 1992.
• MW 75: Philip French said in the Observer (after 1990 release): "L'Atalante is one of the most beautiful and haunting movies ever made ... The simple story – sad, funny, human – defines what is meant by the poetry of the cinema."
• MW 75: Director Nikita Mikhalov said: "Everything the French nouvelle vague later achieved grew out of this film."

• MW 13: Terence Rafferty called it "messy, imperfect, defiantly incomplete: it's a collection of inspired fragments, the sketchbook of an artist"
• MW 70: Warner suggests that Vigo's experience of anarchism influenced L'Atalante.