Zero's main poignancy for me is in the wondering what would Vigo have gone on to do in the years after this and L'Atalante, which was a truly great film - an accidental classic. To me Zero is definitely not in that bracket but shows all the hallmarks of a director learning his trade, with youthful, exuberant inventiveness and an ingenuous glee in borrowing bits from other films. Ordinary reality and bizarre surreality go neat into this soup. Almost in the same manner as the Beatles' Mr. Kite 34 years later: Let's use up some bits of film by doing a lot of oddball plot-less things, throw it all together and see what we end up with. Vigo lived to see the results of his efforts with this, unlike L'Atalante.
At 40 minutes with many silent stretches or after-dubs, and a gramophone record for background music it has been the template for the kind of stuff generations of proto-Arty University students have poured out over the decades since. However, it was still deemed worthy enough for a suitably Arty and ... blown-up remake in 1968 as If - which has also always been applauded to the skies as Art by people with little discipline and a wish for less.
I always thought the snatch of snatch was as with almost everything with Vigo, accidental, accidentally he created (like L'Atalante) a film which is still puzzled over and applauded all these years later by marginal Artheads and ignored or dismissed by 99% of the world's discerning population. Basically it's an unlovely film that can only be completely liked by the pretentious and completely disliked by the impatient, but because Zero has its few entertaining moments I occasionally like to sample (believe it or not) I'm on the fence.
At 40 minutes with many silent stretches or after-dubs, and a gramophone record for background music it has been the template for the kind of stuff generations of proto-Arty University students have poured out over the decades since. However, it was still deemed worthy enough for a suitably Arty and ... blown-up remake in 1968 as If - which has also always been applauded to the skies as Art by people with little discipline and a wish for less.
I always thought the snatch of snatch was as with almost everything with Vigo, accidental, accidentally he created (like L'Atalante) a film which is still puzzled over and applauded all these years later by marginal Artheads and ignored or dismissed by 99% of the world's discerning population. Basically it's an unlovely film that can only be completely liked by the pretentious and completely disliked by the impatient, but because Zero has its few entertaining moments I occasionally like to sample (believe it or not) I'm on the fence.