Povodom Nice / À propos de Nice

France
1930. / 45’ / 35mm

Directed by:
Jean Vigo

Written by:
Jean Vigo

Distribution:
GAUMONT S.A.
30 avenue Charles de Gaulle
92 200 Neuilly-sur-Seine, France
Tel +33 (0)1 46 43 20 20
Fax +33 (0)1 46 43 20 33

A manifest of social documentary, a pamphlet by the subversive poet of French cinema Jean Vigo, a social satire about Nice: city of tourists, hotels, gambling, people who make a living out of it; a grotesque carnival of pleasures of flesh obsessed with death. Akin to engaged essay-films, city-symphonies, the film brings together the avant-garde legacy of the 1920s and announces the currents of poetic realism and French New Wave, as permanent inspiration and challenge to contemporary filmmaking.

With this first film, Vigo founded his poetic of film anarchism, presented as a speech about social irresponsibility titled ‘Social cinema, on documentary point of view’ for Groupement des Spectateurs d’ Avant-Garde in June 1930, before the screening: “the last gasp of society so lost in its own escapism that it makes one sick and sympathetic to revolutionary solution.” The film was shot by Boris Kaufman, with the camera-eye focused on physical reality which has to be documented and interpreted as a document, steals the spirit of the community: a world of the opposites which connects bourgeois leisure and disturbingly poor quarters.

Jean Vigo (Paris 1905-1934), a film visionary, son of Miguel Almereyda, a Basque- Catalonian anarchist who was murdered in prison, spent his childhood in boarding schools. In his short life he made only four films: Taris (1931), À propos de Nice (1931), Zéro de conduite (1933) and L’Atalante (1934), whose resistance to social injustice resulted in censorships, cutting and re-editing; Zéro de conduite was banned for 14 years.