Am Airlines - Poetic Realism: The Film Genre a Director Died to Make

Yet committed to showing reality "as it was"--a cinema of life and of heart, otherworldly at times, rather a loosely conceived feeling and evocation: poetic, poetic realism was never a unified movement or ideology, unlike Soviet montage or French impressionism. A brief outbreak of lyricism sandwiched between the bludgeoning horrors of two world wars, poetic realism was a highly influential yet short-lived movement in French cinema of the 1930s, more a tendency than a genre in its own right.

L'Atalante (1934), and his masterpiece, an unusually realistic evocation of an unhappy childhood that was banned by censors, ro de conduite (1933), first with Zé director Jean Vigo is credited with founding poetic realism, despite the fact that he only lived to make four films.

Poetic style never before seen in cinema, employing the dreamlike cinematography of Russian-born Boris Kaufman--who would later work in Hollywood--and a surreal, but Vigo transformed it completely, l'Atalante was originally a simplistic story assigned to the director by distributors Gaumont, namesake of a Greek Goddess.

Vigo effortlessly achieved poetry, in filming prosaic words and acts, ois Truffaut describes, for as New Wave director Franç separate and then are reunited--L'Atalante is a masterpiece, on the surface a straightforward romantic tale--two newly weds on a river barge cruise who fight.

By chance a crew member discovers her and the couple are reunited. In deep regret she forlornly but fruitlessly searches for husband and barge--shots of her longing for him in silence. Men make unwanted approaches and her handbag is stolen--persons and actions all evocative of a broken and unhappy inner state, beggars and thieves are everywhere, departed wife encounters horror after horror on the streets of Depression-era Paris; simultaneously. The distraught husband imagines her reflected in the water, separated from his wife.

That which is ugly as reminder of beauty absent, in which beauty is said to exist even in its opposite; mono no aware (a sensitivity to things), the film is evocative of the Japanese conception of beauty. A practise never before seen in contemporary cinema--usually located in the artificial and fantastic--and rare even today, the director alternating the bitter-sweet narrative of separation and reconciliation with unflinching images of the grit and ugliness of everyday life, l'Atalante is also grounded in reality, although highly poetic.

Critic Hal Hinson goes so far as to suggest Vigo's poetic realism is other-world inspired:

" "There's such innocence and invention in Vigo's style here that the film seems less a consciously constructed work of art than an emanation.

" Not intellect, they're organised by feeling. But the links are imperceptible; there's a logic to the way in which it's ordered, vigo moves the story forward by poetic association. As if we were asleep and fully awake at the same time, our senses are set at a heightened level, and though almost nothing appears to be happening, the picture seems to drift. The effect is almost narcotic. . . And we feel submerged in it, he continues: "The mood Vigo creates here is a kind of enchanted melancholy.

" The director replied that "he lacked the time and had to give everything right away, " and when a friend advised Vigo to guard his health, truffaut suggests that "It is easy to conclude that he was in a kind of fever while he worked, remarking on the director's state of mind during this period. And even directed some scenes from a stretcher, while making L'Atalante Vigo was so ill that he constantly risked collapse.

" L'Atalante was advertised as "a film inspired by the celebrated sung so admirably song by Lys Gauty. Who attempted to increase its popularity by reducing the running time and changing the title to Le Chaland Qui Passe (The Passing Barge)--the name of a popular song inserted like an axe into the film, l'Atalante has never been fully restored from the butchering it received from distributors. His work heavily censored by the French Government, due to the high degree of realism employed in his films--often to unflattering effect--Jean Vigo was accused of being unpatriotic.

Friends caught her as she was about to jump out a window. Got up from the bed and ran down a long corridor to a room at the end, lying beside him as he died, his beloved wife Lydou. Only a few days after the first disappointing cinematic run of L'Atalante, jean Vigo died of complications from tuberculosis in 1934 aged just 29.

Rising to 6th best in 1992, sound poll, with L'Atalante being ranked as the 10th greatest film of all time in a 1962 Sight & history has viewed Vigo's work more favourably. And he is perhaps lucky not to have lived to see his masterpiece so barbarically hacked to pieces, passionate film-maker who fights every step of the way against lesser imagination and sensibility, vigo has been described as the epitome of the radical.

And allusions to Jean Vigo and L'Atalante can be found in many of their works, many of the Neorealist and Nouvelle Vague directors worked upon the sets of poetic realist films before beginning their own careers. Which in turn inspired an increasing sense of realism in Hollywood cinema, and the French New Wave (la Nouvelle Vague) of the 1950s and 60s, leading directly to the Italian Neorealist movement of the late 1940s, significantly changed the course of French and world cinema, , together with similar works of poetic realism by contemporaries Jean Renoir and Marcel Carné l'Atalante.