silver nitrate notes

L'Atalante and Jean Vigo's River

14 jun 2012

Jean Vigo (1905-1934) made L'Atalante (1934) while dying of tuberculosis. He finished the shoot too ill to supervise the editing. The studio Gaumont-Franco-Film-Aubert re-cut the film for commercial release under the title Le Chaland qui passe, reducing it significantly and replacing Maurice Jaubert's score with a popular song. Vigo died three weeks after release, at twenty-nine. The original cut was reconstructed over decades from surviving elements and is now the version we watch.

The cinematographer was Boris Kaufman (1906-1980), whom we have met later on On the Waterfront and 12 Angry Men. Kaufman was the younger brother of the Soviet director Dziga Vertov and of the cinematographer Mikhail Kaufman, and had come to France in the 1920s as part of the Russian cultural emigration. L'Atalante was his second Vigo film. He would work with no one as extraordinary again for twenty years.

The plot is slight. A barge captain (Jean Dasté) marries a village girl (Dita Parlo). They board his canal barge and travel toward Paris. She grows restless. She leaves him. He falls into depression. She returns. They reconcile. The film's interest is in the texture of the river, the cramped life of the barge, the cat-filled cabin of the bargehand Père Jules (Michel Simon).

Kaufman photographs the Seine and the canals of northern France in available daylight. The locks, the tow paths, the Parisian quays, the misted early-morning surfaces of the water, are all photographed with an attention to natural light that would not become common until the Italian neorealists ten years later. The famous underwater shot, in which the captain sees his wife's face appear in the water as he swims, was shot in a studio tank with the actor Parlo suspended in a diving suit. Kaufman lit the tank from above with a single hard source. Parlo's gown floats around her. The shot lasts a few seconds. It is the image the film is most often remembered for.

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sources
[1] Smith, John M. Jean Vigo. Praeger, 1972.
[2] Temple, Michael. Jean Vigo. Manchester UP, 2005.
[3] Salles Gomes, Paulo Emílio. Jean Vigo. University of California Press, 1971.
[4] Criterion Collection essay by Luc Sante, 2011.