Jean Vigo takes a short time of our lives to present something that impresses us for a long time with the short documentary "Taris, roi de l'eau" and he does that with a boundless simplicity. In ten minutes, he presents Taris, a famous swimmer showing the different swimming techniques and Vigo's camera gives us details on the movements of the swimmer on the water, everything very impressive.
The ordinary viewer will find nothing special about it but to me I find quite interesting the way images of a not so simple act has the ability of being translated to the screen in a enormous facility, swimming looks so easy (yeah, of course he's a trained swimmer but still) and it really makes you want to get out and swim for a while. It's that impressive, it's that beautiful. Some of the techniques Vigo used here like reversing the image backwards when the swimmer is jumping on the pool were very innovative at the time and quite funny now, but even so it's cool to see it.
Considering that today's short films have more substance and more things to present, and with all these advantage sometimes they fail to really grab our attention even for five minutes is that I look back to something like "Taris, roi de l'eau" ("Taris, King of the Water") and I think how moved and impressed I was with such a simple work of art. That's the role of art in everything: take the most ordinary thing of life and make of it something beautiful. Vigo really did it here. 10/10
The ordinary viewer will find nothing special about it but to me I find quite interesting the way images of a not so simple act has the ability of being translated to the screen in a enormous facility, swimming looks so easy (yeah, of course he's a trained swimmer but still) and it really makes you want to get out and swim for a while. It's that impressive, it's that beautiful. Some of the techniques Vigo used here like reversing the image backwards when the swimmer is jumping on the pool were very innovative at the time and quite funny now, but even so it's cool to see it.
Considering that today's short films have more substance and more things to present, and with all these advantage sometimes they fail to really grab our attention even for five minutes is that I look back to something like "Taris, roi de l'eau" ("Taris, King of the Water") and I think how moved and impressed I was with such a simple work of art. That's the role of art in everything: take the most ordinary thing of life and make of it something beautiful. Vigo really did it here. 10/10