Summary:
Jean, a barge captain, marries Juliette in her rural village. The newlyweds depart for Paris to complete Jean’s cargo delivery. They are joined on the boat by Père Jules and ‘le gosse’, a cabin boy. Jean promises Juliette a night away from the monotony of the barge once they reach their destination. However, their shipmates thwart these plans. Père Jules and the cabin boy escape into the streets of Paris before them and Jean cannot leave the boat unattended. Juliette eventually sneaks away to explore the city on her own and Jean responds to the betrayal by leaving her behind. The two reunite with the help of Père Jules. He discovers Juliette in a music shop and returns her to the boat and her beloved.
Analysis:
By nearly all accounts, including Jean Vigo’s, L’Atalante killed its director. Vigo was just 29 years old. L’Atalante was only his fourth film and his first feature-length project. The film depicts the first days of marriage between Jean (Jean Dasté) and Juliette (Dita Parlow) – a barge captain and a young woman from the countryside – as they sail along the waterways with a small and peculiar crew. L’Atalante was shot on location between November 1933 and January 1934 in the expansive network of canals that stretch from Paris northward to Le Havre. Vigo had suffered from respiratory illnesses throughout his life and the harsh winter accelerated his already deteriorating health. He spent the final weeks of production directing from his sickbed. His cinematographer, Boris Kaufman, shot the concluding scene – a startling aerial view of barges and canals – without him. Vigo never saw the footage. Three weeks before his death, the Gaumont studio imposed a final indignity upon his work. L’Atalante premiered in September 1934 at the Colisée cinema in Paris as Le Chaland qui passe (the passing barge), a mangled version of Vigo’s original. The film had been re-edited, renamed and rescored to satisfy popular tastes and a set of spectators who never arrived. Le Chaland qui passe quietly disappeared from public view and Vigo died on October 5 1934, eight months after completing L’Atalante.
It is difficult to extricate L’Atalante from the tragic biography of Jean Vigo and the mythologies that have emerged in the aftermath of his early death. Vigo has come to occupy a monumental position in the history of French cinema, at once genius, martyr and patron saint of the French New Wave. Successive rounds of archival research and restoration (by Gaumont in 1940 and the Cinémathèque française in the 1950s) brought L’Atalante into contact with the energetic post-war cinephiles and critics in France. Just a few short years after his death, Vigo was resurrected as ‘cinema incarnate’, the model of radical and rebellious experimentation to which all filmmakers should aspire (Temple 2005: 2).
In L’Atalante, however, another mythology circulates, one that offers a framework – beyond Vigo’s talent and sacrifice – for reading and understanding the film. The title refers to the name of the barge that floats Jean and Juliette towards marital conflict and resolution in Paris, but it also refers to a minor figure from Greek mythology: Atalanta, the daughter of Iasus, abandoned on a mountain and raised by bears (in one version of the myth) or hunters (in another). Atalanta is trained to fight and hunt. She refuses to marry and sails with the Argonauts as the only woman in their crew. She is an orphan and an oddity, at once animal and human, male and female, mortal and goddess. Her mixed history and genealogy challenge tidy taxonomies of both gender and metaphysics. One can easily find points of comparison between the figure of Atalanta and the character of Juliette, the barge patronne who leaves her rural home at the start of Vigo’s film and sets sails as the only woman on board. But more interesting is the way in which this foundational myth prefigures the visual, narrative, and socio-historical mixtures that make L’Atalante such a remarkable and un-categorisable work.
L’Atalante combines the diverse modes of experimental filmmaking that constitute the European avant-garde in the 1920s and 30s. The film brings together the city symphony, surrealism, and poetic realism; it is at once an exploration of the labour and lives of the French working class and a study of cinematic work and ways of seeing. L’Atalante likewise intersects with cinema’s transition to sound, a moment of visual and industrial flux that manifests itself within Vigo’s film as yet another site of experimentation and play. The first scene exemplifies the film’s composite form. L’Atalante begins with the sound of ringing bells and a montage of establishing shots: an image of the barge’s stern; an enigmatic burst of mist that covers and conceals the canal; and an extreme low-angle shot of a church’s spires. This opening sequence asks us to consider: Where is the sound coming from? And what does it mean? The bells ring out across these shots, attaching to each in turn. The sound seems to emanate from the ship, the clouds, and, finally, the spires. We soon see Jean and Juliette exit the church and can perhaps retroactively read the sound as wedding bells and the film’s first images as a map of the processional to come. The young couple will make their way from the ceremony to the awaiting barge, with the villagers trailing behind them. From here, however, the narrative ambiguities and visual associations continue to gather. Jean and Juliette glide through the village streets, then a field of haystacks, a forest of flowers, and a barren field before finally arriving at the ship. As spectators, we never know where they are, how much progress they have made, or how these distinct spaces are connected. Each cut introduces a radically new geography and a different cinematographic style. Jean and Juliette move across, away from, and into the frame; they are close, distant, and fragmented into parts. The first shot recalls the absurd processional of Entr’acte (René Clair, 1924), while the last approximates the strict formalism of Hans Richter or Walter Ruttman. Rather than adhering to a particular visual school, Vigo and Kaufman cycle through approaches. Each shot reframes and rethinks the relationship between human figures and the land.
In this introduction, Vigo crosscuts between the wedding processional and the frantic movements of another set of bodies: Père Jules (Michel Simon) and the young shipmate (Louis Lefebvre). The two men exit the church before our first encounter with Jean and Juliette, holding hands as they race back to the barge and prepare for the new patronne. The substitution of two men (one old, the other young) for the beautiful couple is a visual gag – one of many scattered throughout the film and the surrealist canon; however, it also signals the film’s much broader play with bodies, genders and types. As Jean crawls on all fours to greet his new wife and characters dissolve in heavy fog, L’Atalante questions the stability of visual knowledge and rigid visual forms. Père Jules is an important example of this epistemic flexibility and uncertainty. Among the crew of domestic travellers, he is the spectre of colonialism and the embodiment of the exotic threat. Beneath his tattered clothes, he reveals a sprawling map of tattoos, including a male face (that ‘smokes’ from his belly button) and a female figure that stretches out across his back. Adorned in Juliette’s skirt, he transforms into a woman, a member of a primitive tribe, and a matador in Seville. And he describes a photograph of a nude black woman hanging on his cabin wall as ‘Me, when I was young’. Another set of gags, to be sure, but also something more. Like so many aspects of the film, Père Jules is fluid, mercurial, a patchwork of other times and places. For Michael Temple, Père Jules and L’Atalante are inextricably, symbiotically joined: ‘Père Jules becomes the film’s decentred centre, everywhere and nowhere, palpably dispersed in every sound and image, as if Simon’s body and voice had somehow got into the grain of the filmstock’ (2005: 132). The comparison speaks to the unstructured and ephemeral qualities that define Père Jules – torn and dispersed across the celluloid – as well as the collage of influences and inscriptions that L’Atalante shares with the ageing sailor.
Technically, L’Atalante is a narrative film. It contains a skeletal set of plot points, inherited from a script written by Jean Guinée. Love is found in the countryside, lost in the modern city, and eventually regained on the canal. But when ‘L’Atalante’ initially departs, the film and its characters go almost nowhere (that is, until they dock in Paris). There are no recognisable landmarks: just water, a boat, and an indiscriminate shoreline. Meaning emerges out of the mise-en-scène, or the physical and material world of the film, rather than the clarity or accumulation of narrative events. L’Atalante draws our attention to the barge’s cramped interiors, overflowing with dirty dishes and laundry to be done, broken-down machines, and dozens of cats that scratch, breed and blur with the dishevelled Père Jules. The camera squeezes in between objects and bodies, and presents the domestic spaces in awkward, proximate views. Truffaut accused L’Atalante of having smelly feet, an assessment that foregrounds both the corporeal and extra-visual aspects of the film (1978: 27). L’Atalante is tactile, textured, and scented with the grime of the working everyday. But for all of its investments in the sensory-material experience of life spent and worked along the canals, L’Atalante shares in the surrealist search for the marvellous and the magical in the most common of matter. For surrealist poet and novelist Louis Aragon, cinema was privileged in its ability to ‘endow with a poetic value that which does not yet possess it, to wilfully restrict the field of vision so as to intensify its expression’ (2000: 52). In Père Jules’s cabin (and the film’s most famous scene), Juliette uncovers his stash of trinkets, an oasis of memory and global travel. For Jean, the cabin is filled with disgusting junk. For Jules, it is a collection of the ‘most beautiful things’. But for Juliette, the objects liberate her from the drudgery of life on the canals, sending her imagination to the open sea.
This division between the everyday and the extraordinary gives shape to the film’s most abundant visual resource: water. As many critics have noted, L’Atalante is a very damp film (Andrew 1985; Conley 2006). Water encircles the barge and dominates the exterior shots (in the form of mist, fog, cloud, and snow). The atmosphere along the canals, like the filth inside the cabins, appeals to our skin and sense of touch. It also contributes to some of the most superlative compositions in the film (and, some might well argue, the entire history of cinema). But within the narrative of L’Atalante, water transcends its physical and aesthetic attributes. Vigo explicitly joins this element to a form of supernatural and cinematic vision. In the first days of their marriage, Juliette holds Jean’s head beneath the wash water and asks, ‘Don’t you know you can see your beloved’s face in water?… When I was little I saw things like that. And last year, I saw your face in the water.’ After Juliette leaves the barge behind for a life in Paris, Jean jumps in the canal, broken-hearted and searching for his beloved. He swims against the sounds of Maurice Jaubert’s haunting score, his body flowing into and out of frame. Juliette appears, angel-like, suspended in her wedding dress and superimposed upon Jean’s body. On the one hand, the image belongs to Jean. It is his vision of Juliette, conjured in her absence. And yet, on the other, it cannot belong to him. It is an image ofJean and Juliette, a multilayered projection of bodies and frames that delights in the material and marvels of cinema itself.
When Père Jules and Juliette sit together at her sewing table, he says, holding up his palms, ‘Look at these hands. You’d never guess all the things they’ve done.’ Of course, everyone aboard the barge works with his or her hands. They are a band of tinkerers, or bricoleurs, collecting, cobbling, making magic, and playing music with the scraps of modern life. Dudley Andrew describes hands and handiwork in L’Atalante as a ‘symbolic cluster’ (1985: 64). There are scenes of hands, comments about hands, and, most remarkably, a set of pickled hands on a shelf. However, the symbolic content of these hands at work (or in jars) extends beyond the diegesis. L’Atalante is a handmade film, like the objects packed into Père Jules’s cabin (‘all handmade’, he insists). It is rough around the edges, made by a band of tinkerers and bricoleurs who borrowed, gathered, and experimented with whatever was at hand. Beneath its messy and imperfect surface, one finds an open text, a dense collection of images and ideas, and a radically mixed Atalanta.
Katherine Groo
Cast and Crew:
[Country: France. Production Company: Gaumont. Director: Jean Vigo. Screenwriters: Jean Guinée, Jean Vigo, and Albert Riéra. Producer: JacquesLouis Nounez. Cinematographers: Boris Kaufman and Louis Merger. Music: Maurice Jaubert. Editor: Louis Chavance. Cast: Jean Dasté (Jean), Dita Parlow (Juliette), Michel Simon (Père Jules), Gilles Margaritis (the showman), Louis Lefebvre (the kid).]
Further Reading:
James Dudley Andrew, ‘The Fever of an Infectious Film: L’Atalante and the Aesthetics of Spontaneity’, in Film in the Aura of Art, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1985, pp. 59–77.
Louis Aragon, ‘On Décor’, in Paul Hammond (ed.), The Shadow and Its Shadow, New York: City Lights Books, 2000 [1918], pp. 50–4.
L’Atalante (1934) 51 Tom Conley, ‘Getting Lost on the Waterways of L’Atalante’, in Murray Pomerance (ed.), Cinema and Modernity, Piscataway, NJ, Rutgers University Press, 2006, pp. 253–72.
Paul Emilio Salles Gomes, Jean Vigo, London, Faber & Faber, 1998.
Michael Temple, Vigo, Manchester and New York, University of Manchester Press, 2005.
François Truffaut, ‘Jean Vigo is Dead at TwentyNine’, in The Films of My Life, trans. Leonard Mayhew, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978 [1975].
Jean Vigo, ‘Toward a Social Cinema’, in Richard Abel (ed.), trans. Stuart Liebman, French Film Theory and Criticism: A History/Anthology, 1907–1939, volume II, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1988 [1930], pp. 60–3.
Marina Warner, L’Atalante, London, British Film Institute, 1993.
Source Credits:
The Routledge Encyclopedia of Films, Edited by Sarah Barrow, Sabine Haenni and John White, first published in 2015.