What I know going in
Not much really, except that the film involves a boat and married couple.
Immediate Reaction
L’Atalante is a strange film to be released so early after the introduction of sound. It largely eschews plot, you could boil its story down to two main incidents, Juliette leaving her husband and the subsequent search for her. Instead it focuses on minor incidences and small character interactions. It also has some absolutely stunning shots and an overall cinematographic style that looks so delicate the film might disintegrate if you happened to lightly touch the screen. The film also has an overall dreamy quality that is quite remarkable. There are few specific sequences that create said feeling. The first is a scene where the barge slowly drifts through a mysterious fog. If you had drifted off before the scene began, you might believe that the boat had departed the Earth and was now wafting gently through some wispy clouds. The second is a strange sequence where Juliette and Jean are shown tossing around in their respective beds. Previously, Juliette had left the boat to get a brief glimpse of Paris, and Jean, upset over an encounter Juliette had with a charming peddler, disembarks without her. We are treated to series of phantasmagoric cross-dissolves as the two, separated, try to sleep. It’s an odd scene that could be read as them in agony over the distance between them, or in some type of sexual ecstasy over the thought of the other. It’s hard to tell, but it’s probably a mixture of both. Another great sequence concerns Jules as he dives into the water looking for an image of his wife, this practice is set-up earlier in the film by Juliette. As he floats around, ghostly, haunting images of his wife fade in and out of existence. Likely due to the hallucinations of the oxygen-starved Jean. It’s a magnificent sequence and places L’Atalante more in line with Sunrise than The Jazz Singer.
There tends to be misconception about older, black-and-white films that they are very staid, and clean in presentation and dialogue. That is absolutely untrue for L’Atalante. The main characters all appear in various states of undress, even Juliette, although she is kept to tasteful, at least by today’s standards, nightwear. Pere Jules even gets to show off some of his vulgar tattoos, which include a naked woman and crudely drawn male face around his belly button designed for a joke involving a cigarette. The film is also very sexual. Much of the first half is dominated by Juliette and Jean hungrily making out with each other. They are even shown sleeping together in the same bed (a big no-no in American cinema after the introduction of the Hays Code)! There are also frequent, humorous references to sex and the body parts required. There is even a comic cutaway involving Jules and the dog barber who shaved his head, beating Family Guy to the use of that type of gag by about 70 years. Again, nothing shocking by today’s standards, but I am interested to learn what contemporary audiences thought of those aspects of the film.
As I mentioned earlier, there is not much of a plot, and despite the heightened aesthetics of the film, it has a general, loose and rough quality to its setting and characters that make it easy to enjoy. In other words, the milieu of the film seems appropriate for underclass barge workers. Apparently these are traits common to “Poetic Realism” a French cinema movement of the 30’s that combined aspects of realism with the lusciousness of silent film visuals. It’s a style I am very unfamiliar with, so I can’t get in-depth on how L’Atalante fits into the movement overall.
In addition, the film has an excellent, evocative sound design. A highlight is during the scene where Jules guides Juliette through the various knick-knacks he has acquired during his long life. Each object has a distinct sound that summons a mood appropriate to the place it’s from. And they all combine to create a pleasurable, mini-symphony.
If I had one criticism of the film it’s that the central couple has some severe issues that are never really worked out. Jean seems content as the captain of his small boat and becomes gruff to Juliette once the initial sheen of their marriage wears off. Juliette clearly wants more excitement from life. Their passion for each other is displayed perfectly through the visuals, but their differences are never dealt with. It’s probably why, as much as I liked the film, that I shrugged it off once it was over. However, it does seem wrong to apply my own, modern thoughts on relationships when the film is so clearly fairy tale-esque in its depiction of romance.
Further thoughts
Film history is such a strange, constantly-in-flux beast. You could spend a whole year tracking down and watching the canon films, feel satisfied, come back a decade later, and find that the canon you based your watchlist on has been extensively added to, had previously-assumed unassailable films removed, and just been generally messed with. Side note: In general, due to the efforts of the World Cinema Foundation and Mark Cousins’ The Story of Film: An Odyssey, I expect a general shift away from established classics and a greater influence placed on films not from America, France, Germany, Russia, and Japan. Every year there seems to be at least and lost film that is rediscovered and hailed as a new masterpiece, and a timely retrospective or restoration can immediately improve the reputation of a long forgotten film. It frightens me that had I been born a generation earlier, I might not have been able to watch Wake In Fright or seen the almost complete version of Metropolis that didn’t exist even a few years ago. And I am glad that I came of age during the DVD and Blu-Ray era as I doubt I would be quite as keen on the classics if my only access to older films had been horrible fuzzy, pan-and-scan VHS copies. It frightens me even more to realize that after my death there will probably be plenty of new discoveries that will reshape film history for future generations. The malleable nature of films history mostly has to do with the fact that film wasn’t considered a serious art form, like literature or painting, at its inception. For its few decades film was treated mainly as a diversion. Furthermore, Film, more than any other art from, except maybe video games, has, is, and will be incredibly dependent on technology, which is both a good and bad thing. Good in the sense that new technologies can change the way stories are told, and improve the ease with which the general populace can view these stories. Bad in the sense that underrated, unpopular, or just plain forgotten films can get lost between transitions. The third unfortunate aspect of film is that it requires many more people to make a movie than it does to write a book or put on play. This brings an element of business into film, an element that can limit creative expression and censor challenging material all in the name of the bottom line.
All that is to say that L’Atalante has had a fascinating journey from maligned premiere to now masterpiece status. Every review of the film will tell you about Vigo’s failing health during the shooting, how the production company cut out 25 minutes in an attempt to make the film more marketable, and how Vigo, on his deathbed, was unable to fight for a final cut and dies knowing that his film was ignored by the population of France and met with indifference by critics. The film’s initial release was at the wrong time. If it had been made about a decade earlier, its potent visuals and raw, complex approach to humanity would have been of a piece with other silent films. Released two or three decades later, and the film would have been embraced like such convention-busting films as Psycho, La Dolce Vita, and Breathless when people had become fed-up with the prestige and conservatism of most mainstream pictures.
L’Atalante’s fascinating, convoluted past shows the importance of film critics. If the Cahiers du Cinema critics hadn’t been so entranced with the film, it wouldn’t have ended up on those early Sight and Sound lists, wouldn’t have gotten an important restoration at the beginning of the 90’s, wouldn’t have gotten the amazing Criterion, Blu-Ray treatment that allowed me to see this amazing film, and I doubt that I, a biochemistry student living in a Podunk, Illinois town would have been able to see and write about it.
Why is the film on this list?
Jean Vigo’s first, and only, feature combines the poetics of silent
cinema, the best early sound tech had to offer, and a timeless, rough humanity.
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