A Propos de Nice

My Vigo disc also contains the film maker’s first movie, a documentary made with cameraman Boris Kaufmann A Propos de Nice. This 22 minute picture is a portrait of the city of Nice. The film is beautifully shot using hidden camera techniques, contrasting the sun-worshipping wealthy on the beach and promenades of the beautiful city with workers and slum dwellers. The movie starts with limpid water sparkling in the sun, regattas sweeping here and there, and ends with sooty workers fueling enormous furnaces under cyclopean black smoke-stacks. Vigo cross-cuts the two types of footage, editing on formal patterns – a curve in a wave will be compared with the curve in a woman’s leg, etc. Each shot matches the next shot either by contrast or by comparison and so the film’s images are woven together in a very tight web of poetic correspondences. The documentary proceeds through imagery of the beaches and pleasure-seekers to carnival parades and, at last, ends with the industrial footage at the conclusion – but this summary doesn’t do justice to the extremely dense cross-cutting, so-called parallel montage developed from Soviet models. (Boris Kaufmann’s brother, Denis, is better known to the world as Dziga Vertov, the famous Soviet-era documentary film maker; Kauffman ended up in Hollywood after shooting many well-known European films – he was the cameraman on L’Atalante – and made, among other movies, On the Waterfront). Vigo’s father was an anarchist, Miguel Almereyda, apparently murdered by authorities in a French prison cell in 1912. The commentary on A Propos de Nice suggests that the film is a sort of proto Hour of the Furnaces, and, in fact, argues for political meanings in the final images of the smokestacks belching soot into the sky over Nice. But, in context, the final scene is preceded by orgiastic carnival imagery of women dancing on a platform, kicking in the air, and the camera’s angle is resolutely “up the skirt” – a angle that seems to inspire the women to exhibitionist displays of their crotches and upper thighs – and so, I (innocent of the political subtext) took the smokestacks for phallic erections, eruptions of lust. Vigo was an anarchist himself and this is demonstrated by the commentary’s complete inability to effectively describe the film – each time the commentator, an earnest socialist at a British college, says something, the image following his words, invariably proves him wrong. (Taris, a nine-minute documentary about a great French swimmer, also on the disc is excellent as well – we get super slow-motion imagery of the swimmer with a lucid, dispassionate account of how to swim; the effect is totally surrealistic, like Bunuel’s use of a documentary about scorpions as the opening scenes of L Age d’Or – the dreamlike aquatic imagery is mismatched with dry narrative and, in the final scene, Taris, dressed in a natty suit, nonchalantly walks away, striding over the water as if it were pavement.)