Zéro de conduite (1933)
Directed by Jean Vigo

Film Review

L'Atalante (1934) is often cited as Jean Vigo's masterpiece, an epithet it certainly merits on account of its breathtaking visual poetry, but the film that reveals his character and unfulfilled potential most vigorously is the one he made immediately prior to this, Zéro de conduite (a.k.a. Zero for Conduct). Drawing on his own painful experiences as a teenager at a strict boarding school in France (circa 1919), Vigo crafts an amusing portrayal of childhood rebellion, melding bitter shards of social realism with Chaplineque comedy and surreal asides that clearly owe something to Luis Buñuel.  Vigo's ardent love of freedom and intense loathing for conventions shine throughout the film, which is nothing less than an all-out assault on thoughtless parents who routinely dump their offspring in institutions that are no more than prisons, and an education system based on fear and brutality.  Zéro de conduite may be shorter (it runs to only 42 minutes) and far less polished, but it is superior to L'Atalante in at least one respect: it gives us a far truer portrait of the man who directed it, warts and all.

At the time he came to make Zéro de conduite, Jean Vigo had all but reached the end of his tether.  He and his wife Lydou were chronically ill with tuberculosis and in severely straitened circumstances.  Vigo's attempts to establish himself as a filmmaker had so far been fruitless and his time was fast running out: within two years he would be dead, carried off by septicemia just as his greatest film was being mutilated beyond recognition by its distributor.  Vigo had made a promising start with his first film, a subversive satirical short entitled À propos de Nice (1930), and this had led to a commission from Gaumont, to make a short film on the swimmer Jean Taris.  But a combination of ill health and bad luck frustrated Vigo's efforts to find a backer for his next film.  His fortunes suddenly took a turn for the better when he came into contact with Jacques Louis Nounez, a successful businessman who was keen to become a film producer.  Nounez took an instant liking to Vigo, seeing him not as a man slowly dying from consumption but as an amiable, energetic 27-year-old with a bright future, and agreed to finance his next film, which was originally titled Les Cancres.

Working at Gaumont studios over Christmas and the New Year in 1932/3, on a tight budget (200 thousand francs) and an even tighter production schedule, Vigo had an uphill struggle to complete his third film.  The child actors, all non-professionals (some dragged off the street), were hard to control and Vigo's declining health exacerbated matters.  One day Vigo would be bursting with energy and world work flat out like a human dynamo; the next, he would be so depleted that he could scarcely crawl out of his bed.  The stop-start nature of the production can be seen in the uneven pace of the final film, with its disjointed narrative and brutal transitions between scenes.

The exteriors were filmed at the Collège de Saint-Cloud (which Vigo had attended as a boy) and surrounding streets, allowing Vigo to imbue his film with a realism that he considered essential to his art.  To this end, he was well-served by his faithful cinematographer, Boris Kaufman, whose talents would be highly sought after in Hollywood, for such films as Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront (1954) (for which he won an Oscar) and Sidney Lumet's Long Day's Journey Into Night (1962).  Most of the characters in the film were based on people Vigo knew, either at school or at the prison in which his father was incarcerated.  One of the principal child characters, Tabard, represents Vigo himself, whilst three others (Colin, Caussat and Bruel) were inspired by three school friends.

On the surface, Zéro de conduite appears to be an innocent tale of schoolboy rebellion, a kind of experimental 1930s version of The Belles of St. Trinian's (1954), but examine it carefully and you will discover that it is far more than this.  It isn't just France's inhumane education system that Vigo is attacking, but the hierarchical system on which the entire world seems to operate, with the weak and vulnerable constantly oppressed and exploited by an unscrupulous, self-selected ruling class.  It is worth remembering that Vigo was the son of a notorious anarchist agitator, Eugeni Bonaventura de Vigo i Sallés, alias Miguel Almereyda, founder of the anarchist newspaper Le Bonnet rouge.  The spirit of revolution was in Vigo's blood, and had been since his childhood.

When the main character Tabard spits the phrase "Je vous dis merde!" into the face of his adult tormentors he is echoing the title of a famous article published by Vigo's father in the socialist paper La Guerre sociale in 1912.  After his father died (apparently having committed suicide in prison) when he was 12, Vigo devoted much of his time to unearthing his writings and he clearly saw himself as the Son of Almereyda.  Zéro de conduite hints at the political direction Vigo's career may have taken had he not died so tragically young after completing his next film.  'Enfant terrible' would have been a mild term for the Vigo-that-may-have-been by the end of the decade.  What Zéro de conduite really shows us is Vigo's Utopian vision of a world in which the oppressed masses rise up and overthrow the tyranny of their masters, a world of freedom for all.

And Vigo leaves us in no doubt as to which side he is on.  From the outset, the children (who are every bit as unruly and demonic as the subtitle Jeunes diables au collège implies) are cast as the heroes of the piece. Abandoned by their parents, placed in an austere stone-walled mausoleum to be ritually brutalised by adults who are as ridiculous as they are cruel, how can we not sympathise with them?  How fitting that the most senior of the oppressors, the headmaster, should be a midget who is obsessively concerned with his appearance.  The scene in which this miniscule tyrant first enters the frame is the funniest in the entire film - dwarfed by the children in front of him, and from whom he expects unalloyed respect, he is an immediate object of derision.  This is presumably how Vigo saw all authority figures - as jumped-up pygmies.

The most memorable part of the film is of course the astonishingly poetic pillow-fight sequence in the boys' dormitory, which culminates in a bizarre parody of a Catholic procession.  With feathers raining down around them like snow, the boys appear to be in a state of transcendent delirium, revelling in the freedom they have seized for themselves.  Vigo sustains and heightens the haunting poetry of the moment by slowing down and reversing the film, even playing Maurice Jaubert's score backwards to give it an ethereal, almost religious feel.  In one of the most remarkable sequences in film history, Vigo brilliantly conveys what it must feel like to taste freedom for the first time, the sweetest rapture known to man.

Vigo shows his daring in more subtle ways throughout the film.  In one scene, one of the more odious schoolteachers is shown tenderly caressing the hand of one of his pupils (significantly the one based on Vigo himself), and the inference is shockingly blatant.  Once again, Vigo is not afraid to confront reality and show us the unpalatable truths of life - and it says something about his integrity and courage that he would dare to broach a subject as controversial as paedophilia in his first important film.  Do we dare infer that Vigo was himself a victim of such abuse when he was a boy?

The most maligned element of Zéro de conduite is its soundtrack, which often feels strangely disconnected from what we see on the screen.  The dialogue is succinct and says all that needs to be said, but it is poorly aligned with the images, and gives the impression of a silent film that has been dubbed as an after-thought.  Far from bridging the gap between the pictures and the sound, Maurice Jaubert's score seems to heighten the sense of separation, but, oddly, this works in the film's favour, stressing its playful eccentricity and anarchic vitality.  Zéro de conduite is not a polished piece of cinema.  It is a jagged scrapbook of a film, with abrupt leaps from one scene to the next and some totally bizarre excursions into the surreal (a drawing on a teacher's desk inexplicably comes to life, for example).  But this is what gives the film its charm - it is not the dull, ordered, rational world of grown-ups it shows us, but the chaotic, unpredictable, fanciful world of children.  Like the carefree teacher played by Jean Dasté (later to be immortalised as the hero of L'Atalante), Vigo follows the example of his hero Charlie Chaplin and invites us to see the world through the eyes of the imaginative child that we once used to be.

In common with all of Vigo's films, and indeed Vigo himself, Zéro de conduite soon found itself in an early grave.  On its initial screening in Paris on 7th April 1933 the audience reaction was intensely hostile.  Most of the critics who saw it disliked it and were quick to point out its technical and moral failings, although a few were impressed by its daring.  Considered an insult to the French educational system and an incitement to violence in schools the film was immediately banned in France after its premiere.  It was not until 1945 that it was finally passed by the censor.  Along with the recently resurrected L'Atalante, Zéro de conduite had an enormous impact on the directors of the French New Wave, in particular François Truffaut, who referenced the film in his debut feature, Les 400 coups (1959).  Since, it has influenced scores of independently minded filmmakers, and Lindsay Anderson's If... (1968) is a respectful remake.

Jean Vigo may not have changed the face of cinema in his life time, but his films were to be an essential galvanising force behind a cinematic revolution a quarter of a century after his death, and they continue to inspire film directors around the world.  The joyous eruption of freedom that he captures so vividly in Zéro de conduite, in a schoolboy rebellion that rips convention to pieces and allows imagination to run riot, anticipates cinema's great liberation from the mid-1950s onwards.  In this, the hard-won age of the auteur, the spirit of Jean Vigo is still very much with us.

Film Synopsis

The summer holidays over, a troupe of young boys return downheartedly to their boarding school, where they will no doubt have to endure another gruelling term of sanctions and punishments at the hands of their cruel teachers.  Although they find a kindred spirit in their new athletics master, who amuses them with his Chaplin impressions, the boys have little to console them.  They are bullied by their teachers, tyrannised by the school's prim dwarfish principal and forced to live on a diet of green beans.  When four of the boys are given a zero for bad conduct, robbing them of the only privileges left to them, they make up their mind to rebel, by sabotaging a college fête...