Jean Vigo Marathon - Zero for Conduct

My Jean Vigo Marathon

What started as me just watching Zero for Conduct ended up turning into me watching all of Jean Vigo's work, as he died tragically at the age of 29 after making only three short films and one feature-length. I'll do a separate post for each of the films in the order I saw them. 

Here's the first one:

Zero for Conduct (1933)

My first Jean Vigo movie, Zéro de conduite, is a legendary short film about a group of schoolchildren who openly rebel against the teachers and headmaster of their boarding school. It was his last short before making L'Atalante. 

Vigo's father was Miguel Almereyda, an anarchist militant journalist who died in jail when Vigo was only 12, thus causing his mother to send him to a series of boarding schools. So, childhood rebellion was inevitable story fodder for the young filmmaker. He based several of the characters in Zero after fellow students from this time, and we can safely assume the same goes for the faculty.

Considered incredibly controversial at the time due to its pro-rebellion, anti-establishment angle, France didn't allow the film to have an official release until 1945, eleven years after Vigo's death. Aside from controversial aspects, many critics just saw the film as a jumbled mess, and though I can see where they're coming from, the film's main problem was being too far ahead of its time.

It's fast-paced, oddly cut together, and has some absurd elements, such as the headmaster who is played by a dwarf with a very long, silly beard, so its oddities tended to distract me from what an audience in 1933 might see as "controversial." While it would later inspire the more menacing If..., as well as the more raucous Rock n' Roll High School, I think Zero has far more in common with a Wes Anderson film than either of these more rebellious takes on the story. With its zany hijinks and child characters who are in many ways more mature than their adult masters, its hard not to see inspiration for films like Rushmore and Moonrise Kingdom. I see it more as a comedy rather than a harrowing tale of children gone wrong.

Overall I enjoyed the film and can understand why Bill Hader put it on his list of 200 films that every comedy writer should see, which was the weird actual reason I saw this in the first place.