When I first saw L’Atalante as a young graduate student in film history class I was transfixed. I remember feeling that it was one of the most beautiful films I’d ever seen and one of the truest. I think I was 25, and I was struck by the sense of universality of experience. The film was more than 50 years old then (and more than 80 years old now) but its poetic elucidation of the heady, sensual, exciting, and confusing early stages of being a couple was timeless. And the visualization of the story was stunning.
Juliette and Jean embracing the morning after their wedding
It’s a simple plot, and I’m going to give it away right here, because the revelation of the film is not what happens—it’s how it happens, and how beautifully the interior world of the characters is explored in tandem with the sights and sounds of the ordinary world. L’Atalante is the name of a river barge, and the film tells the story of the young freshly-married barge captain Jean and his wife Juliette. They live together on the barge; at first, wrapped up in the discovery of each other, the barge is enough. But, the young wife starts to feel restless and hemmed-in, and the husband preoccupied with work, is both busy and reluctant to expose his young village wife to the larger world. One night she sneaks out and takes the train to Paris—just for a little adventure—never intending to leave her husband. He, however, in a fit of umbrage, continues down the river without her. Miserable apart, eventually they reunite, with some of the gloss of naiveté removed from both of them, yet recommitted and ready to start their journey together again.
Juliette, like an otherworldly apparition, glowing in her wedding dress as she walks the barge
Visionary director Jean Vigo made only four films (two of which were experimental shorts) before tragically succumbing to tuberculosis at the age of 29 just after the release of L’Atalante. In fact, his worsening health prevented his complete involvement in the release of the film, and resulted in drastic alterations to the edit and a change in the title (from L’Atalante to The Barge that Passes). Film historians have over the years, tried to restore as much of Vigo’s original vision as possible. Vigo’s prior film Zero for Conduct, set in a French boarding school, had been banned by the government for being anti-authoritarian. Following on the heels of that controversy, Vigo’s producer wanted to exert a bit more control over the director’s creative impulses. That control was exerted through requiring Vigo to work with a provided script (which he eventually greatly altered) and established actors who, when combined with some of Vigo’s regulars, formed a brilliant cast, whose performances were surprisingly subtle and naturalistic for the period. (Dita Parlo plays the young wife and Jean Dasté her husband, with major star Michel Simon getting lead billing as the unforgettable Père Jules. Parlo has the distinction of also having appeared in Renoir’s film Grand Illusion, another film often considered one of the greatest in the history of cinema.)
Young love in L'Atalante
The film begins with the wedding, which takes place in the bride’s village. The stiffness of the procession from church to barge feels more like a funeral procession than a wedding. In fact, when I recently watched the film again, I was struck by the scene in which the bride’s relatives cluster rigidly on the banks of the canal to see her off to her new life. Those village characters immediately reminded me of Gustave Courbet’s Realist masterpiece from nearly a century earlier, A Burial at Ornans. As the couple leads the procession (spatially isolated from the wedding guests) they wind through cobbled streets and architecture more akin to the 19th century than the 20th, reminiscent of the photographs of Eugène Atget. They wind past haystacks that evoke Monet, and wheatfields that evoke van Gogh, yet the margins of the film are filled with the evidence of 20th-century progress and industry—steel bridges, smokestacks, traffic, construction materials. Like the still photographers in Street Photography to Surrealism, Vigo is fascinated by the details of everyday life and finds uncommon beauty in the ordinary. Also, like the photographers of 1930s France, he explores the visual poetry to be found in manipulating images—using superimposition and underwater photography to create compelling, emotional sequences that reveal the inner world of his characters.
Jean Vigo (1905-1934)
Vigo was the son of a militant anarchist journalist who was murdered in prison. Vigo himself joined the Association of Revolutionary Writers and Artists in 1932, a group mobilized against war and fascism whose members included Man Ray, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and André Kertész, among others. Vigo’s political and social views color all his films, but the nuanced representation of human individuality seems to trump these ideals—preventing the films from feeling overly literal or derived from a political manifesto.
A still from the 1934 film L'Atalante
L’Atalante is a film of surprising passion, tenderness, and physicality—Vigo uses the bride and her white dress, veil, and platinum hair to radiate light, and the wedding-night-kisses the couple share are as natural as the wind moving through her veil. The couple’s journey on the barge can be read very literally as a metaphor for progressing through life, and the barge can be understood also as the constricting space of the marriage. But the film is far from literal and allows its characters and its symbols to be multi-dimensional. Juliette, the young bride, brings a woman’s skills to the barge and while eager to manage the housekeeping of the ship, simultaneously finds herself yearning to see more of the world. She clearly loves her husband, but also is intrigued by her encounters with other men. The film uses the somewhat unsavory, muttering, tattooed, cat-festooned, and curmudgeonly character of Père Jules to great effect as the embodiment of worldly experience, repulsive and attractive simultaneously. Juliette is intrigued by his mix of independence, unconventionality, and irreverence. (Many of the props used to create the exotic, multi-cultural assemblage of artifacts in Père Jules’ cabin were purchased at the same flea markets frequented by photographers featured in Street Photography to Surrealism. Other items were brought in from the personal collections of Vigo and his friends.)
Pere Jules in his curiosity cabinet of a room
When Juliette visits the city, we see a great deal of 1930s Paris—a homeless person sleeping on a park bench, the occasional horse-drawn wagon sharing the road with cars, men waiting in employment lines. A window-shopping scene recalls the surrealists’ interests in reflections, fragmentation, and incongruous juxtapositions. The separated lovers long for each other and both are vulnerable in the absence of the other. Vigo films some unforgettably beautiful sequences that poetically evoke their emotional and physical desire. Together—this real world of location shooting along the rivers and canals outside Paris—and this inner world, of love, desire and dreams is magical.
Left: Juliette visits Paris in L'Atalante
Right: Eugène Atget (French, 1857–1927), Boulevard de Strasbourg, Corsets, 1912.Albumen print. Collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg. Exhibition organized by art2art Circulating Exhibitions. Print included in Street Photography to Surrealism.
Film historian Gerald Mast summed up Vigo’s work this way, “Freedom was Vigo’s primary theme…Vigo’s films show the determined and successful efforts of his characters to create temporary pockets of freedom in the midst of the society that confines them.” L’Atalante is often included in lists of the greatest films of all time, and noted critic Henri Langlois went so far as to say “Vigo is cinema incarnate in one man.”
Juliette: a still from L'Atalante
I know that when I watch L’Atalante, I still feel a bit of the 25-year-old me, in sympathy with the film’s young lovers. And even these years later, the gorgeousness of Vigo’s truly imaginative, poetic, visual storytelling holds me in thrall.
L’Atalante is the first in our French film series, so be sure to mark your calendars for Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game, March 1, and Selected Films of Man Ray on April 26.