François Truffaut on Vigo's L’Atalante

This week in class, we watched the beginning of Jean Vigo's L'Atalante (1934). In this movie, following in the style of Poetic Realism, the audience is privy to an unconventional way of life, along with all the grit that can accompany such a life. Jean Vigo's films often animated a feeling of anti-establishment in an urban city/realist background, and favored the side of the weak/powerless; in class, we discussed this along with a brief discussion on Vigo's use of depth of field and in-camera editing, with such, decisions of focus are made by the camera.

For this week's blog, I have found an interview, from 1968, between Eric Rohmer and François Truffaut on Jean Vigo's L'Atalante. This interview is interesting as it shows the impact Vigo had on Truffaut as a film maker. In the interview, Truffaut communicates how he saw L'Atalante at a young age and it deeply resonated with him as a child with a keen sense of reality; Truffaut goes on to say how Vigo had a special way of showing a physical reality and of expressing the "reality of the flesh".
Later in the interview, Truffaut states that Vigo was "the first professional avant-garde cinema maker...like Godard today...in between those two the idea of avant-gardism has completely disappeared in cinema." I found this statement especially interesting as it ties in three filmmakers we are studying this semester: Jean Vigo, François Truffaut, and Jean-Luc Godard.

Here is the link for the interview with Truffaut:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xR0QKFTw1Cc


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