When it comes to what the Film Doctor was keying in on, I wasn’t looking close enough to even take note of the physical representation of the scene as it was presented. The additional insight certainly adds a fascinating layer I hadn’t noticed before.
Now, I mentioned Vigo and A propos de Nice, the first film from the French director that passed away at the age of 29. I’ve since watched Taris and Zero de Conduite and also listened to the commentary track with Michael Temple, author of “Jean Vigo”, on Criterion’s presentation of Apropos de Nice where Temple interprets a lot of what we’re seeing. Exploring why he believes it’s so great.
Most of what he mentions I noticed when I watched the first time around. This includes the exploration of class, the tourists and the reactions of the people Vigo was capturing on film and those that paid attention to the camera, those that didn’t and why some may act differently than others. However, during the latter third of the film, which begins with a carnival in Nice, Temple begins exploring the movement from an exploration of class and social order to what he refers to as the third part being a symbol of “revolution” and the “violent destruction of some future order”. Wait what?
He reaches this conclusion based on his understanding of Vigo as a left libertarian and anarchist and explains his understanding of a carnival as the “joyous upheaval, the joyous revolution of the existing social order. It is literally turning the world upside down. That is what a carnival is. It’s caricature, it’s grotesque, it’s about a much freer, more sensual and sexual liberation of the body.”
Watching the film the first time I didn’t have this interpretation in the slightest as I missed many of the thematic cues in the latter third after catching so many of them in earlier scenes. Robert Polito’s essay accompanying the release sheds even more light on the film:
“Hidden,” “lay bare,” “stripped,” “rip the blinkers”–sly visual jokes abound regarding this cinematic exposure, especially the trick transformations of the bootblack who rubs away a shoe to disclose the naked foot, and the elegant woman whose sparkling clothes “dissolve” through rapid costume changes until she is nude. But resourcefully, mercilessly, Vigo and Kaufman indicate that there is a city inside the city that the city will not acknowledge. Some of this revelation of secrets is economic–what looks like playful pleasure at the carnival turns out to be big business, as they jump-cut from the stylized Battle of the Flowers to the working women doggedly harvesting the blossoms, and then to the crushed, soiled blooms on the streets. The Nice of the poor within the tourist rendezvous is at once antipode and mirror. By turns, warships in the harbor and giant blackface minstrel heads in the procession intimate the militarism and racism backing the city’s fortune. The darkest secrets, however, prove more existential. People reduce to animals–an ostrich, dogs, alligators, and flocks of birds. Humans also tilt toward the inanimate–dolls, masks, and hollow or freakish cemetery statues–much as Nice itself is full of cracks and inevitably will revert to rocks and sea.
Little in A propos de Nice is as it appears, and impulses partake of their opposite. If that pre-Lenten carnival signals the annual explosion of the city’s repressed libidinous energy, the frenzy also emerges as a furious manifestation of a collective suicide hysteria, ‘the last gasps of a society in its death throes,” as Vigo concluded in “Towards a Social Cinema.” If those menacing smokestacks at the denouement embody the “revolutionary symbols” (Kaufman’s nostalgic Soviet phrase) of a future apocalyptic democracy, they’re also the furnaces where, on Shrove Tuesday, King Carnival will be raucously burned—and also perhaps the fires of everlasting damnation.
I’ve included Vigo’s film below, which runs just under 23 minutes and is something you may find interesting given the information just above. It provides a way of looking at Vigo’s social documentary in a way I didn’t look at it originally and begins to open your eyes to cues you may not have otherwise noticed. So to answer the question in my headline, no, I don’t think you can ever look deep enough, the most fascinating part of the journey is within the exploration. After all, while Chbosky didn’t intend the metaphor I conjured up for Perks of Being a Wallflower, I think it adds a little something to the story to make it even that much better.
On a side note, with Polito mentioning Vigo’s lecture “Towards a Social Cinema“, I urge you to give it a read. It’s short and excellent, with many quotes you may find valuable when looking at the kind of films we’re getting today. Not to mention my favorite of the lot: “Shame on those who kill in puberty what they could have been.”
