Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #786 in DVD
• Released on: 2004-10-25
• Rating: Parental Guidance
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Formats: Black & White, PAL
• Original language: French
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of discs: 2
• Running time: 160 minutes

Special Features
Region 0

Synopsis
Jean Vigo is considered one of the great masters of French cinema, despite having died at the age of 29 and only making four films. This 2 disc set presents restored versions of his films, including his two great masterpieces - L'Atalante and Zero de Conduite, also included are a range of special features guaranteed to please.

Customer Reviews

Sheer beauty from start to finish.
Some reputations in cinema are over-flated. So what of Jean Vigo, whose career output consisted of three shorts and one feature?
Widely considered one of the all time great film directors, is his legend really deserved on the strength of one full length film?
Oh yes and then some! His short montages 'A Propos de Nice', and 'Taris', a beautiful portrait of champion swimmer, Jean Taris, show a delightful touch and grace of a film-maker still developing his craft.
But it was his anarchic boarding school short 'Zero de Conduit', that truly showed the world that he was a major talent to watch. Unbelievably fearless for its day (full frontal nudity and swearing), this took the youth versus authority storyline to spectacular new heights and spawned a major (and inferior) remake with Lindsay Anderson's 'If'.
However, it was 'L'Atalante' that sealed Vigo's reputation forever. It was hard to believe that Vigo was only 27 when he made it. The greatest ode to heterosexual love that cinema has ever seen (sorry Dr Zhivago), this is a work of delightful playfulness and subtle erotism. A young couple aboard a floating barge find their honeymoon besieged by fighting and fluffy cats (don't ask). The purity of Vigo's film-making is breath-taking in its purity. If you love cinema in any way, shape or form, you simply have to own this.
Not only that, but the second disc is bursting with goodies. A massive documentary on Vigo covers his life, times and films, a look at the various versions of L'Atalante, interviews with key-players, a biography, posters and more! I just hope one day all DVD's are like this.

The Complete Jean Vigo
This excellent collection of Jean Vigo's films demonstrate his exraordinary talent as a film maker. Innovative, spectacular, fascinating, humorous, angry - seemingly showing a delight in capturing the many varied and colourful aspects of humanity, whilst also containing elements of subversion and anarchy. Despite all this, Vigo is acutely aware of the possibilities of film as an art form. The short films are brilliant and have proved to be influential, however, for me, the outstanding work from this collection is his feature-length masterpiece, L'Atalante.

L'Atalante is a hauntingly beautiful film. It is exquisitely directed, with stunning photography and wonderful acting. The setting on a working barge provides a picturesque and demanding environment for this story of two romantically innocent newlyweds enjoying their love for each other and trying to adapt their relationship to the difficult confines of a barge, accompanied by two disparate characters as crew. Michel Simon as the Mate, Pere Jules, is superb. The film is full of tenderness, humour, and human warmth although the characters are so real their interaction can also be disturbing, prosaic, intriguing, petty - sometimes almost all at the same time. This is an unforgettable film, and anybody at all interested in cinema should see it.

Have you seen his other one?
There is little to be added to the many metres of critical acclaim for Vigo's films. I would say though, if you haven't seen his short film Taris, on the French Olympic swimmer, buy this dvd for that purpose and then sit back and let yourself get quite taken away by his L'Atalante