A PROPOS DE NICE Movie Review

Nizza

Jean Vigo was 24 when he bought a camera to make his first, short film, A Propos de Nice. The cinema club he had started in Nice wasn't enough for him, and though he devoured the films of others, he felt the need to create his own. Reminiscent of the “Kino Eye” films of the brilliant Soviet theorist and filmmaker Dziga Vertov, A Propos de Nice is social criticism of a high order, a documentary portrait of a beautiful seaside town as well as a biting, satirical indictment of much of the society that makes Nice what it is. That Vigo himself was the offspring of two dedicated anarchists is apparent throughout A Propos de Nice. But two things were undoubtedly not obvious at the film's 1929 premiere. One was that Jean Vigo would go on from this brave, amusing, and ingeniously experimental little film to create two of the greatest and most studied films in cinema history, Zero for Conduct (1933) and L'Atalante (1934). The other was that Vigo would die of tuberculosis barely five years later at the age of 29, having completed only two short films and two features, the latter two now universally recognized as seminal masterworks. Representing, therefore, a quarter of Vigo's life's work and an early clue to the vision of a master, A Propos de Nice is both a charming social document and an invaluable cinematic artifact.

NEXT STOP … L'Atalante, Zero for Conduct, The Man with the Movie Camera

1929 25m/B FR D: Jean Vigo; W: Jean Vigo; C: Boris Kaufman. VHS FST, MRV, GVV