« IMDB at 15: the origin saga | Main | Inside his Bubble: Soderbergh's lo-fi process »
October 26, 2005
160 minutes, how can you measure the life of Jean Vigo?
Elbert Ventura has a keen appreciation of the succinct oeuvre of Jean Vigo at New Republic Online: "Standing on the cusp of silent and sound cinema, [Vigo's] movies feel appropriately disconnected from the art's current. So fully do they embody their maker's anarchic spirit that they resist classification, mingling prose and poetry, realism and surrealism, banality and transcendence.
His centenary this year has occasioned a new wave of revivals. But no matter how often we revisit them, the movies never seem to assume a more tangible form. Like the mist that envelops many of his images, they remain ethereal and ungraspable. 160 minutes, give or take, were all it took for Vigo to articulate a conception of the medium that is as inspirational as it is inimitable. Its elusiveness may explain why Vigo's cinema seems the object of cultish devotion rather than mainstream assimilation. Writing in the Nation in 1947, James Agee conceded that both Zero for Conduct and L'Atalante,
which had just then received a stateside release, were "far too specialized." But Agee couldn't restrain himself. In a two-part article, he rhapsodized about Vigo's expansion of the movies' formal vocabulary. "It is as if he had invented the wheel."
Posted by pride at October 26, 2005 01:07 PM
Comments
Post a comment
Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)
(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)