#85 - Zero for Conduct (1933, Jean Vigo)

We screened this one in the film class I took over the winter term. Somehow I alone decided on this film for the whole class. We were given the choice of three to watch (I don't remember the other two) but I let out an excited "ooh!" when this was brought up and in it went. The VHS we watched looked surprisingly sharp although this should be getting a Criterion DVD release at some point in 2007.

A major influence on 1960s new wave directors, not just in France but across the globe, elements of Zero for Conduct can be found in later films like The 400 Blows and If... I was especially surprised at how similar Vigo's and Lindsay Anderson's films were considering how much controversy the latter received upon its release in 1968 (and it still shocks today- I have a theory that Paramount has had a finished DVD waiting for years in limbo that keeps getting pushed back with each subsequent school shooting). Vigo's father was an anarchist jailed by the French government and this film is Vigo's tribute to him. Like If..., Zero for Conduct depicts an uprising by students at an oppressive boarding school. Vigo's film is much more humorous than Anderson's, inflused with a healthy dose of surrealism (the midget headmaster, the classroom doodle come to life). What I was shocked to find connects both films is the frank depictions of homosexuality among the pupils. If... contained an actual relationship between a senior and a younger boy, while Zero for Conduct has the adults fretting about the effeminate Tabard and a friend spending too much time together. The science teacher also has designs on Tabard and that is the catalyst for him, up to that point a very well-behaved child, join his peers' revolt.

Another aspect of the film that I liked and found ahead of its time was the character of Huguet. I always think of the "generation gap" as an invention of the baby boomers, but here is a twenty-something teacher much more in tune with his students than with the administration. Obviously, he is a stand-in for director Vigo, who was only 28 when the film was made. Sadly, he died of tuberculosis the following year just before the premiere of his phenomenal full-length feature L'Atalante, leaving behind a scant filmography establishing Vigo as the greatest "what-if" in cinema history.