Jean Vigo (Shadows Book)

First published in 1957, but with a new afterword by the film historian, Paul Ryan, this biography traces the extraordinary circumstances of the life and career of the French film-maker, Jean Vigo. Born out of wedlock in a Paris garret full of cats, and haunted all his life by the injustice done to his father (a militant anarchist who was murdered in a French prison in 1917), Vigo spent most of his working life battling against authorities wary of his political background, against censors suspicious of the subversive nature of his films, and against a tubercular condition from which he died in 1934 at the age of 29. Vigo made only four films. Two of them are experimental shorts, but the other two - "Zero de Conduite" and "L'Atalante" - are poetic, anarchic, violent, dream-like creations which are among the seminal works of the French cinema.