Agnès Varda's Du côté de la côte | Along the Coast (1958)

Although it was made twenty-eight years after Jean Vigo's À propos de Nice (1930), and although Varda directed Du côté de la côte commissioned by the tourist office, it is impossible not to view the two films side by side. Varda's work is by no means exlusively about Nice, although inevitably the town features strongly. La promenade des Anglais is of course present in both, as is the welcoming of visitors in cars as they roll up to the forecourts of expensive hotels, ditto the Grosses Têtes of the carnival. Obviously the clothes both on the beach and off are particularly starchy and formal in Vigo's film, but that's not the essential difference.

Varda's film is not without its humour: as she speaks about the tranquil spots the viewer sees hordes of tourists, and it is with obvious tongue firmly in cheek that she takes shots of every mention of 'Eden' that she can find: it's not too difficult to see the very subtle criticism of the mindlessness of tourism. Vigo, on the other hand, wasn't working to a commission, and could afford to show the other side of Nice: the poverty in the slums.

Jean Vigo's L'Atalante (1934)

Juliette (Dita Parlo), a young woman living a montotonous existence in a village, marries Jean (Jean Dasté), a sailor working with the older and eccentric Père Jules (Michel Simon) and a cabin boy on the canal boat L'Atalante. The same day, she begins life on the boat. She at first is shocked by the lack of laundering, then by the cats that swarm around Jules, although she soon becomes fascinated by Jules's stories of his travels and the curiosities that he has picked up around the world over the years. She longs, though, to see the bright lights of Paris.

During an evening in the capital with Jean she becomes spellbound by the street pedlar and singer (Gilles Margaritas), and later leaves the boat to go off in search of him. Jean is disgusted when she doesn't return and tells Jules to cast off to Corbeil and leave her behind. Juliette realises how stupid she's been when she sees the missing boat, so she prepares to get a train ticket to Corbeil but has her purse stolen.

Meanwhile Jean too realises his huge error, particularly when he dives into the water and sees a vision of Juliette:  his bride had told him that people see the person they truly love when they stare into water.* Worried for Jean, Jules returns to Paris and finds Juliette, hauls her across his shoulder in true he-man fashion, returns her to the boat, and the lovers are reunited. L'Atalante is considered as one of the greatest films in French – even in film tout court – history, and has influenced large numbers of film directors. Truffaut, for instance, used Jean Dasté in a cameo role as the doctor in L'Homme qui aimait les femmes.

*In some respects, the film is an amalgam of realistic images and dream-like sequences.

Jean Vigo's Zéro de conduite | Zero for Conduct (1933)

Watching Jean Vigo's Zéro de conduite, it's hardly surprising that the film was banned at the time for over twelve years. This movie influenced Truffaut (particularly in Les Quatre cents coups) and Lindsay Anderson in his revolutionary boarding school drama If... (1967). Vigo's father Eugène was an anarchist also known as Miguel Almereyda, whose surname is an anagram of 'Y a la merde'.

This is indeed a revolutionary film, and all figures of authority are seen as enemies by the boys (and of course Vigo). The staff mete out punishment arbitrarily, and the title refers to such punishment. To rebel against such tyrants, Caussat (Louis Lefebvre), Colin (Gilbert Pruchon), Bruel (Constantin Goldstein-Kehler) and the effeminate Tabard (Gérard de Bédarieux) in particular plan to overturn the establishment, and soon the other boys are joining them in creating havoc at the diner table, having a wild pillow fight in which feathers are all over the dormitory, and from the rooftops the main culprits throw objects down on a festival the staff have organised. The coup d’état is complete.

Interesting is the fact that Vigo throws some unusual shots into this for a film of its day: the sight of the sex organ of one of the boys, the chemistry teacher stroking Tabard, and the acceptance of homosexuality by the boys (but certainly not by the diminutive head (Delphin)). A real classic of French cinema.