L'Atalante

Jean Vigo's L'Atalante opened in 1934. It was his only feature-length film, made when he was twenty-nine, just months before he died of tuberculosis at the same age. It entered the top tier of the Sight & Sound poll in 2022, and few films in the whole French canon are loved as much. The studio (Gaumont) butchered the original release, and it survived only in unsatisfactory cuts for over fifty years; the 1990 restoration is now the standard version.

Juliette (Dita Parlo), a young woman from a small French village, marries Jean (Jean Dasté), the young captain of the canal barge L'Atalante. The two of them float through France with the barge's eccentric, tattooed, cat-keeping first mate, Père Jules (Michel Simon, in one of the best-loved supporting performances of pre-war French cinema). The film follows their journey from the village to Paris and the small marital troubles that crop up along the way.

Boris Kaufman photographs the French canals, the barge interiors, the underwater swim (one of the most-cited single shots of pre-war cinema) and Père Jules's cabin, a cluttered domestic museum that is one of the most evocative sets in 1930s European cinema, and French film-makers have been quoting his images ever since. Its tone is a tender poetic realism, somewhere between pure fantasy and strict naturalism, and it fed directly into the post-war poetic-realist tradition that produced Marcel Carné and Jean Renoir's later work.