L'Atalante

Jean Vigo's only full length work, his 1934 classic.
Firstly, the technical aspects Vigo uses. He harshly overexposes, leading to lurid white outs on looming dark backgrounds. This is the first of his moves to have the charaters seem unsympathetic, mechanical, manipulated. This is a sign of Vigo's post humanism; his insistence on a lack of agency, the sometimes out of focussed blurred white faces seeming a long long way away.
Indeed they almost literally are, with shots so long as to cause major surprise in a sound film. This is mixed with Vigo's trademark; the angle of shot. Either far above, making them as though puppets, looked down upon, tallying with the omniscient narrative stance that does judge. We also have the belows, that do not make look impressive but do set off against the sky.
Through these techniques Vigo makes for impressive looming images. They go with the nightmarish themes, the confusion and the idiocy. The surrealist flourishes add to a sense of confusion, things going wrong in a dark and irretrivable way. The captain's room scene is stunningl sudden outbursts of dark fleshy violence, constant confusion, the weird distance we feel as the female lead is strangely sexually dominated by all this nastiness.
Vigo also uses the a very quick montage and mis-en-scene. As in Murnau's 'Nosferatu' he recognises how disoonserting this can be, as though the characters come on rails. There is no time to observe or think, it is as though they fall from scene to scene in an ordered, controlled, mechanical drop that they themselves engineer. They do not evade responsbility.
As the film goes on Vigo becomes more sympathetic; some side lighting. He shows how they try, after chronicling the dirt and failure. The scene underwater has what are almost identifying shots; it is a wonderful burst of these lost figure's search, a dream world they must take air from and doesn't really exist. A great scene.
We greatly enjoyed this Vigo film, for its stylistic ability to show a world truly collapsing through its dirt, disharmony, mistakes. He shows how we await rescue, the futiity of the wait. Terrific cinema.