“L’Atalante,” which I discuss in this clip, is the only feature by Jean Vigo to be released in his lifetime (he died in 1934, at the age of twenty-nine, shortly after the film’s first run ended). The title is the name of a barge; the story is a romance between its captain and the country girl he marries; and its release was a nearly-complete disaster. Begun by its producer as a commercial project—following the outright ban by the French government of Vigo’s previous film, the short feature “Zero for Conduct”—it was received badly by exhibitors and other industry insiders in private screenings and was, as a result, recut and even retitled by the distributor, Gaumont. (The story is told in poignant detail by Vigo’s biographer, P. E. Salles Gomes.) Despite a few favorable reviews and an ecstatic appreciation by the art critic Élie Faure, the altered film was not a success. After Vigo’s death, the martyrology began, and, with it, efforts to restore the film. (They’re detailed in Criterion’s two-disk release of all four of Vigo’s films.)
It’s no exaggeration to call “L’Atalante” one of the greatest films in the history of cinema. A critic at the time called it “neither realistic nor fantastic,” when, in fact, it’s precisely both—an ecstatic film that, at the same time, captures the physical and emotional burden of physical labor, the roaring clamor that goes into the industrial landscape, and the grandiose yet exquisite new forms that result. The film presents one of the great aged characters, played by Michel Simon, who was actually not yet forty but seems to have emerged from the very depths of time. Yet it’s a film of an eternal youth—not just that of Vigo, stuck forever at twenty-nine, but of the perpetually self-renewing cinema itself.