Ehirerapp Waste of time

ChanBot i must have seen a different film!!

Intcatinfo A Masterpiece!

Mathilde the Guild Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

gavin6942 What starts off as a conventional travelogue turns into a satirical portrait of the town of Nice on the French Cote d'Azur, especially its wealthy inhabitants.This is a subversive silent film inspired by Bolshevik newsreels which considered social inequity in 1920s Nice. Vigo himself said, "In this film, by showing certain basic aspects of a city, a way of life is put on trial... the last gasps of a society so lost in its escapism that it sickens you and makes you sympathetic to a revolutionary solution." Historically, the film is interesting not just for its class commentary, but for the involvement of Boris Kaufman, who was a virtual unknown before working as a cinematographer on "On the Waterfront" (1954).

chaos-rampant Well, this is great if you're looking for revolutionary film, not by our disillusioned standards, but from a time when it was thought it could change the world. It failed that but it changed the way we see and dream.So, I've been following threads of that revolution, the revolutionary eye that does not merely see, the way audiences 'saw' live theater, but floats into space it constructs. One such I have found in Russia and followed the Ermoliev trail. I cover aspects of that in my posts about Ivan Mozzhukhin.Another thread is Epstein and later Kirsanoff, both radical makers, both émigrés from the edges of a gone Empire. Also covered here.Another intersects right here, it's a great find if you're attuned to the great experiments of the silent era. It will astonish you by sheer inventiveness, I guarantee. It can travel you.We know it now because it's one of few utterances in film of a man who would have been another Fellini, the legend goes. He was a natural poet but lacked images, or a way to capture them, a way to realize vision. So he teamed up with a young Russian behind the camera then studying in Sorbonne, no ordinary émigré this one.Now this young Russian guy had two brothers back home, fervent revolutionaries and were dabbling in cinema themselves. They were doing some pretty cool, pretty radical things between them. One account says how young Boris - the name of our guy - was kept up-to-date of revolutionary advances of his brothers via mail. Another account reveals that elder brother Denis had been in Paris in 1929, the year he made his seminal work. The two brothers would have got in touch, perhaps that film was screened, perhaps it astonished young Boris.His brothers were geniuses. You will know Denis Kaufman by the alias Dziga Vertov. Mikhail was his right-hand man and a director himself - look out for Moscow from '27.And let's not forget, Jean Epstein was giving lectures at Sorbonne. At any rate, Boris could not have been oblivious to the young medium being reshaped around the world, going beyond theatre. He could not fail to recognize that Jean Vigo wanted to work in this field.So anyway, you may know that Vigo was a young poet born into anarchists. You may appreciate that anarchism then was not what it is now. You may even remember that anarchists were in Lenin's first provisional government, an astonishing thing for contemporary times (but quickly removed to consolidate power). So when Vigo sets out to film what was called a 'city symphony' at those times, Nice was not randomly selected. This is where complacent class enemies lounge half-asleep in the sun, oblivious to the sardonic camera. This is where tourists saunter in the promenade, healthy, satisfied, whole. Where sex beckons.And on the other side of the city, the poor quarters, the workers, the impotentwatchers.So in agitprop terms the Soviets favored, this has bite and gleeful irony to spare. We are shown miniature palm trees and a miniature train contrasted with the real things.But it would be nothing, nothing at all, without the camera seeing the way it does.Vertov's theory, rooted in Marxist dialectics, was of a 'cine-truth' that is possible as man goes beyond thought, beyond meddlesome conventional thought about things, and shifts gears into precise only-seeing that is, in itself, present action. You should know that this is a key insight in Buddhism, well preserved in teachings about mindful meditation.So seeing clearly and without dramatic aftereffects. We get a camera that floats, has an airy quality, regular readers will know I've been following patterns in this type. The 'cine-truth', as it were, is not to be found in the political direction of the gaze, this is only another layer of meddlesome thought that gets in the way, but in the very fact that we are seeing people as they lounged, as they played tennis, waves as they washed the shore clean.Forget this is an anarchist's poem. Let the Buddhist floating world wash over you. Let this just be about planets in their orbits.

MisterWhiplash If you're not awake for it A Propos de Nice could be a little boring, or just a little tiresome. There's no real specific 'point' to the visual, silent documentary that is Jean Vigo's first film, though what is and what isn't shown does strike some interest, along with some other miscellaneous images. It starts off with a spellbinding (and for the time revolutionary) image though, of the city of Nice seen from an angle high above in a plane. From there Vigo shows the upper class life, the vicariousness, the fun (driving cars, swimming in the ocean, going to nice restaurants, dancing), and then the film ends with a strange mix of images of smoke and fire and smokestacks and people laughing in close-up. The best thing about this short film is that there's a free-form approach to getting the city. It's part of what were called the 'city symphony' documentaries, where filmmakers just took there cameras around the city, getting images that delighted, or shocked, them. The film goes by with some strange camera moves, some low-angle perspectives of women doing the 'can-can', and more smiling. But probably the most provocative (and my favorite) image of the film is when there is a woman's body on a chair, we see her in different pieces of clothing, until she's nude. Is this surrealist, or just experimenting in form? It's not like a Bunuel film, for example, because it's more about getting the scenery and shapes of the buildings in Nice than outright provoking the audience. But on the other hand, there is a mix of Freudian, lightly surreal qualities to the film that I appreciated greatly, as were in a few independent filmmakers at the time. It's both exhilarating and a little dull- with the wrong soundtrack (I saw it with a common baroque score) its interest swings depending on the moment. If I can find it, I'd watch it again, especially after seeing more of Vigo's works.

Spuzzlightyear Jean Vigo was surely one of the most surrealist directors who ever lived (briefly, as it turns out). I had the privilege to view his film essay on Nice, Italy, and while I understood very little of it, I'll give it points for originality and style.Vigo chooses not to point the camera at Nice's attractions or sights, but instead focuses on the people, from the rich aristocrats on the beach, to the low-life sweepers. The whole point of this effort is to say that all sorts of people exist in Nice, but the people who come here are the rich Tourist scum, and besides, I just want to look at scantily clad babes.At least, I THINK was the moral.