A propos de nice

Four years before his famous feature film L’ATALANTE (1934), Jean Vigo made a documentary about the French seaside resort Nice and the class differences he found there. In the early morning, this city by the French Riviera awakens. Cafés put out their tables and chairs and the streets are scrubbed. Soon, the boulevard is filled with parading, rich tourists. On the other side of the wall, the real inhabitants of Nice live, the men that serve the patrons and sell the newspapers. Vigo did not make just a portrait of a big city, but made use of experimental camera positions, shooting unflattering images of the bourgeoisie, to make ironical comments on the contrast between rich and poor. The bourgeoisie with its casinos, sea air and exotic animals is juxtaposed with the lower classes, with their shady gambling, alleys reeking of urine, and dead cats. The rigidity of society is visualised by means of geometrical shapes, as found in palm trees, rails and umbrellas. Vigo also shuffles the time and makes use of repetition and a vertiginous, associative edit. Through his camera, simple games like tennis become surrealist rituals, the climax being the carnival that turns the entire city topsy-turvy.