Jean Vigo, very marked by the controversial death of his father, anarchist Almereyda, arrested in 1917 and found strangled in his prison, was in revolt against the middle-class society. In 1928, he settled down in Nice to restore his very fragile health. Attracted by the cinema, he filmed in 1930 a "well-documented point of view " About Nice. His first synopsis analyzed so this filmed pamphlet: " Nice is a city that lives on game : big hotels, foreigners, roulette, natives. The whole is dedicated to death ". Vigo created and animated the first film club of Nice. Back in Paris in June, 1932, he filmed Zéro de conduite ( 1933 ) and l’Atalante ( 1934 ) before dying from a blood-poisoning. His work, very short, revealed a film-maker's real talent, at the same moment lyric and bitter, allying poetry and black humor.
Ralph SCHOR
