User Reviews

Disguised as a travelogue of Nice (in only images, without a single narration or title card), Vigo presents us with some of the most extraordinairy images you'll ever see.

On top of what was inspired observation (just pointing his camera at everyday things and making them look new, as if we've never seen them fore, Vigo was boundlessly inventive. Through simple slow motion, or fast motion, certain sequences are made magical (a procession, a bunch of girls dancing), through editing Vigo makes things disappear and appear, and change shape and appearance. His real magic, though, was in camera angles.

Apropos de Nice is one of the most exciting things i've ever seen. If you've seen Zero de Conduite and L'Atalante, the only two features Vigo completed before his premature death at 29, like me, you won't be able to help yourself from seeking out this little treasure, sadly only 25 mins long.

What was such a joy about Vigo was his wide-eyed wonder at the medium. Like Truffaut, Vigo had a boundless passion for movies as a boy, and at one point he saved up enough money to buy a camera, and he went out on the town in Nice and what we see in this movie is the result. Just Vigo standing there with a camera filming things, and the results are breathtaking. Just the look of things... the shapes of things, becomes illuminated by Vigo's curious camera. Vigo goes dancing on a crowded ballroom with his camera, watches sunbathers with it, watches passersby on the beachside, and watches a man reading a private letter over his shoulder, watches trees blowing in the wind, different men laughing, and much more i'll leave for you to discover. But its not the things themselves, its the way they are looked at - the camera angles, the way the camera moves around them. Vigo's lesson is that words are impotent, but images are magic.

"A Propos de Nice" is a very fascinating work by the great, avant garde filmmaker Jean Vigo (who sadly died at the young age of 29, with an only four film long career). It's done with tons of style and creativity, and is quite reminiscent of the work of Dziga Vertov (most famous for directing the classic film "Man with a Movie Camera")), so, if you enjoyed any of Vertov's films, you may find this short to be quite interesting.

Unlike your average Vertov film, "A Propos de nice" is surprisingly funny and satirical. If there's one thing we've learned from Vigo's small body of work is that he had a great sense of humor, and it's clearly evident in this film as well as both "Zero for Conduct" and "L'Atalante", and it's pretty impressive that Jean Vigo was able to make such a sharp satire without any dialogue or plot.

But, satirical elements aside, it is a truly fun and wonderful visual experience. So, even if you have no interest into looking into the film's hidden satirical meaning, it's still a very well shot and interesting avant garde work.

Influenced by the montage experiments of Dziga Vertov, this 'document' has been fashioned by Jean Vigo and his cameraman Boris Kauffman who just happened to be Vertov's brother. Although this could be seen as Vigo's contribution to the 'city-symphony' genre, beneath its surface lyricism lies a distinctly mordant polemic on social inequality.

Being a Marxist and the son of an executed Spanish anarchist, Vigo has a definite point of view and disguises neither his contempt for the 'haves' nor his sympathy for the 'have-nots'.

Some sequences were considered in 'bad taste' at the time not least the series of dissolves that strips a fashionably dressed young woman down to her birthday suit. This was, unsurprisingly, excised by the puritanical British censor but has happily been restored!

This short but telling piece is one of striking contrasts and Vigo's fragile state of health must surely have coloured his depiction of the Carnival as a prelude to the inevitable.

He did in fact die at twenty-nine but lived just long enough to give us one of the undisputed masterpieces of world cinema, 'L'Atalante'. Let us give thanks for that.

Around the late 20s and early 30s, there was a vogue for 'a day in the life of the city'-type film, which did exactly what it said on the tin; following the city and its inhabitants from dawn to dusk, showing the breathing pulse of great metropoli(sic?). Although supposedly objective documentaries, these were rigidly contrived and structured, and, with the exception of Vertov's THE MAN WITH THE MOVIE CAMERA, generally tedious.

Vigo's short, A PROPOS DE NICE, photographed by Vertov's brother, bears superficial resemblances to this pointless genre. The film follows the day in the life of pleasure resort Nice, from the preparations of cafe staff in the morning, through the activities of the holidaymakers by day, to a nocturnal winding down. In this sense, it is predictably linear.

However, the film is not really like this at all, but a freewheeling melange of distortion, repetition, subversion. The linearity is chopped to bits, replace by extraordinary feats of imagery and montage. The film actually starts with a casino gaming board, and puppets of the typical bourgeois, generally English, holidaymaker, who, along with the chips, are swept aside.

Vigo was the son of an anarchist, and this goading of the bourgeois continues relentlessly, hilariously, apace. Their attempts at unruffled calm are rubbished by the film's dizzying inventiveness. Tilted camera angles mock respectable buildings; unflattering shots of the bourgeois, snoring, bored, flash by at bewildering speed. The rigidity of this society is shown in the geometric grids Vigo imposes, and the continuous references to all kinds of circles (palm trees, railway lines, umbrellas etc.).

Patriarchy is mocked by the ludicrous fetishiation of gangly phallic tumescences, such as tree trunks, or huge chimney stacks. The supposed objectivity of the documentary mode is undermined by the numerous trick effects, which perversely tell a greater truth. A dirty old bourgeois is seen to be mentally undressing the cross-legged women. The recurrent tides, the circularity, the images of destruction and death (monuments, gravestones) all give the lie to the bourgeois myth of escape from reality, and immortality.

The most prominent rupture of this civility is a carnival. Bakhtin once argued that every society allows one day a year for the carnivalesque, in which the topsy-turvy replaces everyday order - hostility and dissatisfaction is assuaged, and order is restored. Doubtless this was the case in real life here, but Vigo refutes this restoration in his film. The destruction is complete. Huge grotesque faces stride mockingly through the streets - the repressed returning - feverish dancing, insane clowning: all supervised and complicit with the police and authority.

But as the montage gathers sinister momentum, the distinctions between the carnivalesque and bourgeois reality blur heavily. The bourgeois resort, with its games, tides, and exotic animals, is compared to the poor quarter, with its gambling, rivulets of presumably urine, and skeletal cats. Objects become subjects and vice versa - a shot of a boat becomes that boat; people looking into the camera become a shot of that cameraman. The cinema is complicit in the bourgeoise spectacle - its dismantling is a hope for the overthrow of the dead, unimaginative bourgeois.

Simple games, such as tennis, become bizarre surrealistic rites. Once our eyes become attuned, everything looks strange - a man opening his cafe seems normal enough, but a man flinging umbrellas at tables is unnerving and odd. The carnival frenzy finally loses its clearcut role and spills into the film's form, disrupting everything in its wake. Goosestepping policemen are linked to lewd cancanning dancers, the one a complete mockery of the other.

Rather than the renewal and continuity of most 'day in the life' films, NICE ends with destruction and fire. And yet it is a refreshing fire, as the hearty laughs at the close suggest. Blow apart repressiveness, and everybody will be laughing. The film is an astonishing, inventive, febrile delight - after 20 minutes, you'll find yourself catching your breath - and itching to hit something.

I first saw this as part of a school film study in 1960. THEN as I recall, I merely saw a creaky old French travelogue highlighting more or less a day in the life of a town on the French Cote D'Azur that bore less relevance, to ME at least, than the rather staid and somewhat uninspiring biscuits named after it!

I saw A PROPOS DE NICE again some forty years later at a lowly patronised French Film Festival which had been hurridly organised apparently by Sydney University. What I saw THAT night, with the advantage of four decades of life's experiences, was a superbly constructed attack on, or should I say "de-construction" OF - the Bourgois. Vigo, himself an anarchist to his left femur, relentlessly piles on the satire with images of the "respected" upper-class acting anything but respectfully.

Innovative indeed was the cinematography from Boris Kaufman with intentionally tilted aspects of buildings to lessen their grandeur, use of shadow and striking images of the people (love the Brit tourists nursing their fish and chips) as they go about their daily business.

Essential viewing for students of early French cinema.

Even that Jean Vigo's production is one of the smallest ones in the history of cinema, many film historians see him as one of the greatest filmmaker ever lived. He only had the time to make four films before his death in 1934, two of them are very well known. Zéro de conduite: Jeunes diables au collège (1933) and L'Atalante (1934), the latter is often seen as the most beautiful film ever made. It's also his only full lenght film. The other two films by him are a bit more rare, a documentary about the winning swimmer, Jean Taris: Jean Taris, Swimming Champion (1931) and his first film À propos de Nice (1930). The film is about a French coastal town - it is amazing how someone cann tell everything in less than a half an hour.

It's hard to picture anyone else to make this film, but Jean Vigo. He knows just where to put the camera and when. À propos de Nice is a very intense portrait of a city, colored with black humor. It basically shows social injustice that lies in the city of pleasures. There are many lyrical realizations in À propos de Nice, for instance the gambling, the sea and the shore. The documentary plays very beautifully like a poem, like Francois Truffaut has said "Jean Vigo effortlessly reached poetry". But the lyricism isn't the only poetic thing in À propos de Nice, it has also got poetic realism and surrealistic visions.

The gambling shown in À propos de Nice is actually very interesting, why is it shown? I've read somewhere interpretations, which say that it shows the economical order, which is based on coincidence, cheating and inhumanity. The antithesis of the richness and poverty is one of the most interesting things in this film. Somewhere in the city people crafts products with their hands, they still have the touch to their products to their work. But then Jean Vigo shows the other side, the Nizza of gambling places and carnivals, where the moral and mental death lies.

What starts off as a conventional travelogue turns into a satirical portrait of the town of Nice on the French Cote d'Azur, especially its wealthy inhabitants.

This is a subversive silent film inspired by Bolshevik newsreels which considered social inequity in 1920s Nice. Vigo himself said, "In this film, by showing certain basic aspects of a city, a way of life is put on trial... the last gasps of a society so lost in its escapism that it sickens you and makes you sympathetic to a revolutionary solution." Historically, the film is interesting not just for its class commentary, but for the involvement of Boris Kaufman, who was a virtual unknown before working as a cinematographer on "On the Waterfront" (1954).

... working in collaboration with Boris Kaufman. The film presents a travelogue-esque look at the French coastal city of Nice, with its wealthy vacationers and sunbathers, as well as the working class and poor hidden away in the back streets. Less a condemnation and more of a snarky poke in the eye, the movie juxtaposes images of slowly baking sun worshipers with those of alligators, the pompous and ostentatiously dressed aristocracy with the street cleaner picking up after them, and a raucous celebration and gaudy parade with a cemetery and a smokestack rendering all things to smoke and ash.

Kaufman was the brother of famed Soviet director Dziga Vertov, and he shows some of the same cinematic inventiveness and an eye for the carefully chosen shot. This was the debut effort from Jean Vigo, who would go on to make two more shorts, and the classic 1934 feature L'Atalante, before dying at age 29 after a brief illness, destined to become a tragic hero and one of the great "what if's" in French cinematic history.

Jean Vigo directed only four movies before dying of tuberculosis at 29. All four of his movies are among the most renowned in cinema history, so I've decided to watch them on the Criterion Collection's release. His debut was 1930's "À propos de Nice", a reflection on the social stratification prevalent in the city (and France in general). We see the elites doing rich people things, while the working class spends its life toiling. No doubt Vigo's anarchist upbringing drove him to address class issues in his works. The wordless film uses various imagery - note the camera angles - to paint a much different picture of France's Mediterranean coast than we're used to.

I recommend it.

Superlative silent era film, both experimental and true to its subject, namely the intense rhythm of summertime Nice. As a truly modernist camera-flneurie, Vigo's project captures the impressionist moment -even if he has to speed it up or slow it down- with rare dialectical acumen as, for example, in the transition from the parade to the grave. The visual acoustics (pebbles/gambling) that influenced Demy resonate.

After scraping together enough money for a camera, it is said that the young film-fanatic Vigo set of portraying the 1920's city of Nice through inexperienced experimentationalism in a curious and clumsy way almost to the point of voyeuristic naivety. But then again, one might argue that such a viewpoint is more naïve than any you might encounter in the film. Through the inventive cinematography of Boris Kaufman, A propose de Nice describes life in the costal city with a subtle overtone of social criticism. As Jean Vigo reluctantly settled in Nice due to bad health, his discontent for bourgeois tourism is emphasised through its juxtaposition with the local working-class. The wealthy visitors lie annoyed and dissatisfied, roasting in the sun, while the local working class wait on them hand and foot with a smile and a cheerful attitude towards life. As they can be seen as death and the decay of man, the festival Mardi Gras dancers might represent the opposite through the life-giving consequence of female sexuality. More important, I believe the film displays a fairly accurate experience of Nice as that of the director through this delicate fusion of realism and surrealism.

Other reviewers have already commented on Vigo's subversive deconstruction of the various narrative requirements and visual iconography of the travelogue format for the purposes of cutting satire, to the point at which we almost forget to view the film on such a level; instead taking it entirely at face value. A Propos de Nice (1930) is a short work, though only twenty minutes shorter than Zéro de conduit (1933), which is an obvious minor masterpiece. Whereas that particular film - as well as the director's final feature, the even greater L'Atlante (1934) - presented captivating images and fragmented ideas backed by traces of character and narrative, the film in question is a purely visual experience. To understand the film we must read deeply into the subtle juxtaposition of the images as they are presented to us, in order to greater appreciate the ideas that Vigo is trying to convey.

As with his second short film, Taris, roi de l'eau (1931), which looked at the daily routine of a synchronised swimmer, A Propos de Nice takes a conventionally bland presentational format and style and transforms it into a pure cinematic event. It is still, in all respects, a small-scale work; one that may confound and disappoint audiences looking for more of the magical realism and pretty evocation of youth and beauty presented by both Zéro de conduit and L'Atlante, though it is worth experiencing purely for Vigo's radical presentation and satirical evaluation of class and the bourgeoisie.

If you're not awake for it A Propos de Nice could be a little boring, or just a little tiresome. There's no real specific 'point' to the visual, silent documentary that is Jean Vigo's first film, though what is and what isn't shown does strike some interest, along with some other miscellaneous images. It starts off with a spellbinding (and for the time revolutionary) image though, of the city of Nice seen from an angle high above in a plane. From there Vigo shows the upper class life, the vicariousness, the fun (driving cars, swimming in the ocean, going to nice restaurants, dancing), and then the film ends with a strange mix of images of smoke and fire and smokestacks and people laughing in close-up.

The best thing about this short film is that there's a free-form approach to getting the city. It's part of what were called the 'city symphony' documentaries, where filmmakers just took there cameras around the city, getting images that delighted, or shocked, them. The film goes by with some strange camera moves, some low-angle perspectives of women doing the 'can-can', and more smiling. But probably the most provocative (and my favorite) image of the film is when there is a woman's body on a chair, we see her in different pieces of clothing, until she's nude. Is this surrealist, or just experimenting in form? It's not like a Bunuel film, for example, because it's more about getting the scenery and shapes of the buildings in Nice than outright provoking the audience.

But on the other hand, there is a mix of Freudian, lightly surreal qualities to the film that I appreciated greatly, as were in a few independent filmmakers at the time. It's both exhilarating and a little dull- with the wrong soundtrack (I saw it with a common baroque score) its interest swings depending on the moment. If I can find it, I'd watch it again, especially after seeing more of Vigo's works.

The genre of city documentaries in the '20s and '30s is normally associated with Germany on account of such films as "Berlin, die Sinfonie der Grosstadt" (1927, Walter Ruttmann) and "Menschen am Sonntag" (1930, Robert Siodmak, Edgar Ulmer and Rochus Gliese).

The genre was however also popular in other countries. In the USSR Dzigo Vertov made "Man with a movie camera" (1929) and in France Jean Vigo made "A propos de Nice" (1930)

The Vertov and Vigo movies are closely related in that the brother of Dzigo Vertov, Boris Kaufman, was the cinematographer of "A propes de Nice"

The relationship is however not limited to the personal sphere. "Man with a movie camera" and "A propos de Nice" are more innovative than their German counterparts. For both films this is true regarding camera positions and camera movements but for "A propos de Nice" it is also true for editing.

At first glance it seems like Vigo is following Sergei Eisenstein when he contrasts the beau monde at the boulevards of Nice with the working class people in their neighborhoods somewhat farther from sea.

At second glance it turns out that Vigo is following Eisenstein in his method of associative editing but certainly not in his Communist ideals. The working class is not portrayed as a victim of Capitalism but is just full of life preparing celebrating carnival. This lust for life is contrasted with images of a graveyard and yes this is associative editing.

A lively and amusing time capsule on the popular seaside city from the south of France. A documentary with touches of experimental, "À propos de Nice" shows a vibrant and bouncy metropolis in a day in the life setting. Water splashing on shore, architecture, people watching, sky gazing, parades, facial expressions, pairs of luscious stockinged legs, dances, upskirts and other scenes of urban activity highlight a bustling romp through the various up and goings in town. It's a marvel to view the vintage fashion, cars, edifices and the departed individuals who leave their lasting legacy with this. The film's endlessly brisk pace shifting quickly through varied images and an occassionally revolving camera stake the flick's claim as one of the early experimental art shorts. Although no classic, the repetitive nature of more or less endlessly cyclic displays of the same things can have one's mind wandering astray this is a memorable effort by the fascinating and tragic Jean Vigo. One of the finest shorts, this is a charming glimpse into another time.

The first film in Vigo's very short career greatly resembles the "city symphony" pieces of the time (in fact, cinematographer Boris Kaufman was Vertov's brother) but is more Bunuellian in tone, skewering the bourgeois and sending out a call for revolution among the common people. Vigo makes powerful, and often hilarious, use of juxtaposed shots to mock the idle rich and ultimately endorsing their destruction. We see upper crust types looking bored and lazy contrasted with the lively working class, unprivileged but vibrant. Surreal montages are used to suggest a stuffy man imagining a young lady in various outfits until she's nude, or another man suntanning until he becomes an alligator. Vigo's fearlessness in editing and camera movement is evident.

This half an hour long silent film by Jean Vigo resembles all of the films who, through many independent scenes put together attempt to portray a city. This one has many scenes about the carnival, the café waiters setting up the sidewalk tables, the bourgeois who hang out there. shots of the carnival, shots of the tiny streets of the old town, shots of the car race and the saling boats stitched together by accordion music by Marc Perrone.

Well, this is great if you're looking for revolutionary film, not by our disillusioned standards, but from a time when it was thought it could change the world. It failed that but it changed the way we see and dream.

So, I've been following threads of that revolution, the revolutionary eye that does not merely see, the way audiences 'saw' live theater, but floats into space it constructs. One such I have found in Russia and followed the Ermoliev trail. I cover aspects of that in my posts about Ivan Mozzhukhin.

Another thread is Epstein and later Kirsanoff, both radical makers, both émigrés from the edges of a gone Empire. Also covered here.

Another intersects right here, it's a great find if you're attuned to the great experiments of the silent era. It will astonish you by sheer inventiveness, I guarantee. It can travel you.

We know it now because it's one of few utterances in film of a man who would have been another Fellini, the legend goes. He was a natural poet but lacked images, or a way to capture them, a way to realize vision. So he teamed up with a young Russian behind the camera then studying in Sorbonne, no ordinary émigré this one.

Now this young Russian guy had two brothers back home, fervent revolutionaries and were dabbling in cinema themselves. They were doing some pretty cool, pretty radical things between them. One account says how young Boris - the name of our guy - was kept up-to-date of revolutionary advances of his brothers via mail. Another account reveals that elder brother Denis had been in Paris in 1929, the year he made his seminal work. The two brothers would have got in touch, perhaps that film was screened, perhaps it astonished young Boris.

His brothers were geniuses. You will know Denis Kaufman by the alias Dziga Vertov. Mikhail was his right-hand man and a director himself - look out for Moscow from '27.

And let's not forget, Jean Epstein was giving lectures at Sorbonne. At any rate, Boris could not have been oblivious to the young medium being reshaped around the world, going beyond theatre. He could not fail to recognize that Jean Vigo wanted to work in this field.

So anyway, you may know that Vigo was a young poet born into anarchists. You may appreciate that anarchism then was not what it is now. You may even remember that anarchists were in Lenin's first provisional government, an astonishing thing for contemporary times (but quickly removed to consolidate power). So when Vigo sets out to film what was called a 'city symphony' at those times, Nice was not randomly selected. This is where complacent class enemies lounge half-asleep in the sun, oblivious to the sardonic camera. This is where tourists saunter in the promenade, healthy, satisfied, whole. Where sex beckons.

And on the other side of the city, the poor quarters, the workers, the impotentwatchers.

So in agitprop terms the Soviets favored, this has bite and gleeful irony to spare. We are shown miniature palm trees and a miniature train contrasted with the real things.

But it would be nothing, nothing at all, without the camera seeing the way it does.

Vertov's theory, rooted in Marxist dialectics, was of a 'cine-truth' that is possible as man goes beyond thought, beyond meddlesome conventional thought about things, and shifts gears into precise only-seeing that is, in itself, present action. You should know that this is a key insight in Buddhism, well preserved in teachings about mindful meditation.

So seeing clearly and without dramatic aftereffects. We get a camera that floats, has an airy quality, regular readers will know I've been following patterns in this type. The 'cine-truth', as it were, is not to be found in the political direction of the gaze, this is only another layer of meddlesome thought that gets in the way, but in the very fact that we are seeing people as they lounged, as they played tennis, waves as they washed the shore clean.

Forget this is an anarchist's poem. Let the Buddhist floating world wash over you. Let this just be about planets in their orbits.

Jean Vigo was surely one of the most surrealist directors who ever lived (briefly, as it turns out). I had the privilege to view his film essay on Nice, Italy, and while I understood very little of it, I'll give it points for originality and style.

Vigo chooses not to point the camera at Nice's attractions or sights, but instead focuses on the people, from the rich aristocrats on the beach, to the low-life sweepers. The whole point of this effort is to say that all sorts of people exist in Nice, but the people who come here are the rich Tourist scum, and besides, I just want to look at scantily clad babes.

At least, I THINK was the moral.

Jean Vigo is a great example of a young filmmaker who died very young and is adored today by cinema freaks. While the body of his work is minuscule (only four films), in some circles he's considered a genius--even though only one of his films ("L'Atalante") was full-length. And, two of his other three shorts are more experimental films than anything else. I frankly don't quite get his reputation, but for fans of this writer/director, Criterion has released a DVD with all four of his films.

This is Vigo's first film and it shows. In so many ways, it looks as if Vigo was having a blast experimenting with film work. You name the camera technique, he tries it here--with lots of variety--like a film student seeing what they can do with a camera. And, this is exactly what it is--like watching Vigo learn and grow in his craft. Fans of Vigo will salivate--others will be a bit put off by the style of the film as well as the subject matter.

As for the subject, the film is, in some ways, like a silent travelogue about the city of Nice, France. However, at times Vigo appears to make statements concerning the upper classes and working people--but mostly, he just seems to be filming EVERYTHING--and a lot of it is stuff you wouldn't expect to see in such a film--such as washerwomen cleaning sheets and the like. I saw a bit of interest in the film, but an not a Vigo-phile, so I think it's a film best seen by the very devoted...and not the other 99% of us.