An extraordinary film about ordinary people: L’Atalante reviewed in 1951

To see L’Atalante again, in spite of its indifferent sound and its occasionally rough-and-ready continuity, is to revive the indelible impression it originally made on the imagination. I first saw it about fifteen years ago, at about the same time as Zéro de Conduite, Vigo’s other major film which he made in 1933. In 1934 Vigo died. His death was the greatest loss that the French cinema has ever sustained. He was a completely fearless film-maker, and a man who was determined to use the film as an artist should, for the purposes of honest expression. He made both Zéro de Conduite and L’Atalante against every possible obstacle that ill-health and inadequate budgets could produce, and if both films bear the signs of his technical inexperience, neither can be criticised, in my view, for lack of imagination or of clarity of purpose. The first is filled with the artist’s scorn for the petty tyrannies of life which occur at a bare and mean school for boys, and the second is a tender-bitter story of a newly-married couple who start their life together on a barge. The story begins with their marriage (“She had to be different”, grumble the wedding party over the bride’s choice of a husband) and ends with their reunion and reconciliation after she has run away from the barge and her self-centred, jealous husband to discover the glamorous city life in Paris of which she has dreamed so long.

In its apparently artless realism L’Atalante is the direct ancestor of the modern Italian realist school, exemplified by such films as Visconti’s Ossessione and de Sica’s Bicycle Thieves. It is not concerned with the niceties of studio lighting, the elegant use of the camera and careful montage all designed to achieve a succession of dramatic points in the development of the story – the technique which is characteristic of films like Quai des Brumes and Le Jour se Lève. Yet these films are also supposed to possess the quality of realism or, as it is sometimes put, poetic realism; which only goes to show how loose our use of the term “realism” has become, or how wide that quality is in films. The realism of L’Atalante is as spontaneous, as “un-arranged” as possible; the realism of Quai des Brumes and Le Jour se Lève is of a kind in which everything spontaneous is stripped away to reveal the reality beneath – the strong, harsh relationships of a particular group of people selected for their dramatic and significant contrast of character. The characterisation of the hero and heroine in L’Atalante is quite undeveloped in this artificially dramatic way, though the naturally eccentric mate, played by Michel Simon, and the professionally eccentric travelling pedlar should, I think, be regarded as characters introduced to form a deliberate contrast to the “normal” skipper and his young wife.

It is in this conception of his hero and heroine that the nature of Vigo’s realism can best be realised. Carné’s and Prevert’s heroes and heroines are human symbols; though Gabin’s earthy good nature may make the characters he plays appear realistic, they are in fact symbols of human goodness placed in strong dramatic contrast to the characters who incarnate evil in all the fatalistic Carné-Prevert films. But the skipper of the Atalante is as ordinary a young man as the one standing next to you on a French ‘bus, and so is his wife, who combines a natural shyness with an innocent eagerness to regard marriage as an initiation into the adventure and glamour of travel and city life. She is typical of any simple woman rather than artificially developed in order to make a dramatic “character”. Vigo, however, illuminates our observation of this couple in their love-making and horseplay and quarrelling by means of the so-called surrealistic interludes which he introduces into the film.

Although Vigo made his films very much as an individual artist, he was in effect one of the avant-garde film-makers in France. Surrealism in the French cinema either took the form of the conscious use of dream-imagery in the representation of experiences difficult or impossible to present directly (as, for example, in The Seashell and the Clergyman), or its use in free association (as in Bunuel’s films Le Chien Andalou and L’Age d’Or). Vigo’s surrealism in Zéro de Conduite and especially in L’Atalante is obviously of the former kind. It is not strictly surrealism at all, for in surrealistic art the conscious mind should play as small a part as possible. But Vigo was well aware what he was doing. When the separation occurs soon after their marriage, frustrated desire and remorse for what they have done combine to drive them half-crazy; the young skipper dives into the canal and swims under water while an image of his wife in her white bridal dress with its veils floating slowly turns round and round. When they reach the coast he rushes madly out to the sea verge in obedience to Freud. Over-and-above this deliberate use of the water imagery, the half fantastic wooing of the girl by the mate in his cramped and filthy cabin filled with mysterious and sinister relics from his travels all over the globe, and by the showman-pedlar in the little bar to which the morose, jealous and unromantic husband takes his wife, together represent a world which is half image, half reality. Vigo is quite prepared to use these forms of partial fantasy to underline the psychological situation of his hero and heroine, who, as we have seen, are in themselves a very ordinary couple. The mingling of these two worlds – the natural, grey world of the bargee and the illuminated world of fantasy – is completely satisfying in L’Atalante.

There is also a rich vein of humour running through the whole film, and Michel Simon as the mate creates one of the finest comic characters to be found in the French cinema. Vigo’s sense of humour entirely preserves his films from catching the disease of the avant-garde – a portentous seriousness about psychological matters. The music, too, composed by Maurice Jaubert, elicits the mood of many scenes, though the theme song itself, composed by Lys Gauty, is bitterly attacked by Jacques Brunius in Experiment in the Film when he writes about L’Atalante: “…before it was shown to the public the producer thought it necessary to soften what was too cruel in Vigo’s outlook on life. Here and there a song by Lys Gauty, having nothing to do with the story, sweetened with its sugary sentiment scenes in which real emotion, veiled by irony, burst out in brief moments of ardour and anguish. For some months the film took the title of the song, Le Chaland qui Passe (The Passing Barge). But Vigo had left a vigorous imprint on his characters and images, and Le Chaland qui Passe is forgotten and only L’Atalante remembered”. Jaubert’s music constantly refreshes the film and prevents it becoming morbid or oppressive.

The main faults of this film are, curiously enough, to a certain extent assets. The photography is very rough – but how could it be otherwise unless the barge had been made artificially in a studio or every scene shot in special lighting and special weathers? This is an everyday story photographed in everyday lighting, and the narrow interiors do not allow for fancy shots. The continuity is also rough, but to have made it smooth and rhythmic would have been to make it, dramatically speaking, self-conscious. Episode follows episode without any special attempt to create dramatic closing scenes or achieve significant pay-off lines; when an episode has done its job in the story, the scene just fades and the next begins. But the main principle of such realistic films as L’Atalante, to achieve unity of atmosphere and faithfulness to the kind of life shown, is maintained, and the film, Vigo’s main work, can always be shown as proof of the fact that his untimely death lost us one of the most imaginative of film-makers.