L’Atalante (1933) by Jean Vigo
“It seems so out of control, every frame is beautifully framed but almost everything happening is so shambly and messy and floppy, and falling down, and Michel Simon and his very bad tattoos jiggling on his fat. Everything is shot from above, inside the Atalante, to give the impression there’s no way a camera could even get in there, we know this was a set, there was plenty of room, but Vigo just makes everything so claustrophobic and dirty. It’s one of the smelliest movie, you can almost smell the salt and the oil and the armpits and the cat pee, but it seems to move with a bounce, it reminds me of a cartoon, like a Fleischer, a Popeye or Betty Boop, it has a rhythmic filthy bounce to it, and it is a very simple story. This was very inspiring to me, I love what Vigo does with the frame, closing the frame in, at the top, the bottom, the side, the foreground. You could probably rearrange all the scenes in l’Atalante and the film would still feel just as great, keeping of course the beginning and the end, that’s kind of a miracle, I know when it was restored it someone found a bunch more of minutes, they added it to the movie, it’s wonderful to see them but it didn’t necessarily makes the movie better, and then they took some of them out again, and that didn’t hurt, I don’t know it just seems to be a miracle that keeps producing wonders whether it’s cut up or left all. It’s great”
More information about L’atalante.
Guy Maddin’s body of work is as beautiful as it is confounding and delirious. He incorporates the language of past cinema, with which he is most intimately familiar from his countless hours of film viewing, and combines this with a pre-cinematic sensibility learned from the books he voraciously devours. A man of prodigious intellectual appetites, Maddin’s many interests and obsessions can easily be discerned in his work.
Selected Filmography :
1988 - Tales from the Gimli Hospital
1990 - Archangel
1992 - Careful
2002 - Dracula, Pages From a Virgin’s Diary
2003 - Cowards Bend the Knee
2003 - The Saddest Music in the World
2006 - Brand Upon the Brain!
2007 - My Winnipeg