Jean Vigo
| Jean Vigo | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
26 April 1905 Paris, France |
| Died | 5 October 1934 (aged 29) Paris, France |
| Occupation | Film director |
| Years active | 1930–1934 |
Jean Vigo (French: [vigo]; 26 April 1905 – 5 October 1934) was a French film director who helped establish poetic realism in film in the 1930s; he was a posthumous influence on the French New Wave of the late 1950s and early 1960s.
Vigo was born to Emily Clero and the prominent Catalan militant anarchist Eugeni Bonaventura de Vigo i Sallés (who adopted the name Miguel Almereyda - an anagram of "y'a la merde", which translates as "there's the shit"). Much of his early life was spent on the run with his parents. His father was murdered in the infirmary of Fresnes Prison on the night of 13 August 1917. The Gomes biography of Vigo says that a common criminal named Bernard, who had been put in charge of keeping watch over the sick prisoner that night, supposedly approached Almereyda's bed while he slept, and used shoelaces to garrotte his victim. "The autopsy showed that Almereyda was suffering from peritonitis and a ruptured appendix. There was over a litre of pus in his abdomen. His end had been near anyhow." Vague theories circulated that Almereyda was hushed up by order of extreme Socialist politicians, Malvy and Caillaux, men later punished for war-time treason. The young Vigo was subsequently sent to boarding school under an assumed name, Jean Sales, to conceal his identity.
Vigo was married and had a daughter, Luce Vigo (a film critic) in 1931. He died in 1934 of complications from tuberculosis, which he had contracted eight years earlier.
Vigo is noted for two films which affected the future development of both French and world cinema: Zéro de conduite (1933) and L'Atalante (1934). Zéro de conduite was approvingly described by critic David Thomson as "forty-four minutes of sustained, if roughly shot anarchic crescendo." L'Atalante was Vigo's only full-length feature; the simple story of a newly married couple splitting and reuniting is notable for the way it effortlessly merges rough, naturalistic filmmaking with shimmering, dreamlike sequences and effects. Thomson described the result as "not so much a masterpiece as a definition of cinema, and thus a film that stands resolutely apart from the great body of films."
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