Vigo, Jean

Related Category: Film and Television: Biographies

(zhäN vēgō´), 1905–34, French movie director, whose original name was Jean Almereyda. His reputation is based on two superb films: Zéro de Conduite (1933) and L'Atalante (1934, uncut release 1989). Zéro de Conduite is a surrealistic depiction of Vigo's years in boarding school and shows a poetic expressiveness and a marked feeling for the strange and unexpected. L'Atalante is a haunting evocation of life on a Paris river barge and in the city's river-front districts.

See biography by P. E. S. Gomes (1971); J. and H. Feldman, An Index to the Films of Jean Vigo (1976).