Jean Vigo

On the frontier between silent film and the talkies, at a time when historic vanguards needed renovation so as not to fall into repetitive and academic patterns, outside of artistic circles and movements, and from a strange solitude shared with his wife Lydu Lozinska, Jean Vigo approached cinema with the daring of an amateur.

As Maximilian Le Cain indicates in Senses of Cinema, from the outset his film "was rooted in a documentary practice that simultaneously transcended the documentary". He was perhaps the first person capable of demonstrating, as Miguel Marías wrote, the compatibility "between the two basic trends into which film is artificially split: photographic, objective, neutral, realistic, documentary and non-narrative; and theatrical, subjectivist, fantastical and manipulating, fictional and progressively interested in the dramatic construction of the story and the stylisation of images".

His strived to recapitulate and synthesise what cinema had been up until then. But more than that, his was a labour of the future: in Jean Vigo's cinema, some of the most innovative and vigorous seams that run through film in general and non-fiction in particular can be glimpsed. Jean Vigo filmed the people of his time, but he did it in a way that transcended time. His cinema spans decades, cinematographic movements and generations and strike us every time as a fascinating exercise in modernity.

Jean Vigo shot each film as if it was the last; but at the same time, each of his shots as if it was the first. With the daring and innocence of someone doing it for the first time. That's why whenever we think about Jean Vigo we always imagine the recasting of cinema. In him, thirty years of film flowed together and from him all the later revolutions were born.