The Cinematheque

New Restoration

“One of the most poetic films ever made.”

Pauline Kael

One of the cinema’s most loved, most quoted, and most influential works, Jean Vigo’s immortal classic can count amongst its progeny François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows and Lindsay Anderson’s If…. Offering a lyrical, joyously anarchic account of youthful rebellion, Zéro de conduite is set in a provincial boys’ boarding school, where four young co-conspirators, chafing under the hypocritical, dictatorial discipline, foment a revolt. Celebrated sequences include a dormitory pillow fight that becomes a balletic blizzard of feathers, and the bombardment of a group of pompous dignitaries with rubbish. Vigo’s wonderfully subversive film deeply offended bourgeois sensibilities and was banned for 12 years as ​“anti-French”! This new restoration, running five minutes longer than other versions, includes sequences previously shortened or cut.

preceded by

À propos de Nice
France 1930
Jean Vigo
23 min. DCP

A key work of French avant-garde cinema, Vigo’s debut is an iconoclastic portrait of the resort city of Nice, made in the ​“kino-eye” style of Dziga Vertov’s The Man with the Movie Camera. Shot by Boris Kaufman, Vertov’s brother, it uses black humour and biting sarcasm to subvert the conventions of the travelogue, becoming an angry critique of bourgeois decadence and indifference to suffering. Said Vigo, ​“Nice is, above all, a town living a game: the great hotels, the tourists, the roulette, the paupers. Everything is doomed to die.”

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Taris
(Jean Taris, champion de natation)
France 1931
Jean Vigo
10 min. DCP

A documentary with a debt to the Surrealists, Vigo’s rarely-seen second film is a beautiful, whimsical study of French champion swimmer Jean Taris—and a dreamlike fantasy on water and weightlessness.