L'Atalante

Vigo re-wrote the story with Albert Riéra, while Nounez secured a distribution deal with the Gaumont Film Company with a budget of FF 1 million.

Forced to find work, Juliette eventually makes her way to Le Havre to meet the barge, though the details of her journey remain unclear.

[5] After Zero for Conduct was banned in France for its controversial depiction of the French education system, Nounez was worried that such a film could not be distributed.

[6] In July 1933, Nounez finally gave Vigo a scenario about "barge dwellers" called L'Atalante, written by Jean Guinée.

[4] In the early 1930s, films and music about "barge dwellers" were popular in France and had inspired such pop songs as "Chanson de halage" and "Le chaland qui passe".

Vigo hired people he frequently collaborated with, such as cinematographer Boris Kaufman, composer Maurice Jaubert, and art director Francis Jourdain, who was an old friend of his father.

[9] Michel Simon had been a lead actor after appearing in the title role of Jean Renoir's Boudu Saved from Drowning (1932).

[11] Jean Dasté had only appeared in Zero for Conduct and Boudu Saved from Drowning before his lead role, but went on to have a long career in France.

[15] Amongst the changes that Vigo made to the original script was replacing Père Jules' pet dog with over ten alley cats supplied by the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

Vigo quickly assembled his crew and shot footage of the cats listening to the music and sleeping inside the loud speaker.

[20] Vigo had previously experienced bad sound quality when shooting Zero for Conduct and was concerned about a similar problem on L'Atalante despite having better equipment.

[21] The first two weeks of location shooting began in the Oise between the Marne and the Rhine and down the Ourcq canal to the basin at La Villette.

Vigo was forced to film documentary-style footage, such as the scene where Juliette walks past a line of real unemployed workers.

At the end of four months of continuous shooting, in early February 1934, Vigo took a vacation in Villard-de-Lans with family and friends to try to regain his health.

Jean Pascal called the original cut "a confused, incoherent, willfully absurd, long, dull, commercially worthless film."

However, Élie Faure said that he was reminded of the painter Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot and praised "these landscapes of water, trees, little houses on peaceful banks and boats slowly threading their way ahead of a silver wake: the same impeccable composition, the same power invisibly present because so much a master of itself, the same balance of all the elements of a visual drama in the tender embrace of complete acceptance, the same pearly, golden veil translucently masking the sharpness of composition and the firmness of line.

And perhaps it was the simplicity of composition, entirely devoid of flourishes or decoration — classical, in a word — that made me appreciate all the more pleasure of savoring the very spirit of Vigo's work, almost violent, certainly tormented, feverish, brimming with ideas and truculent fantasy, with virulent, even demonic and yet constantly human romanticism.

"[29] Eventually, Gaumont cut the film's run time to 65 minutes in an attempt to make it more popular and changed the title to Le chaland qui passe ("The Passing Barge"), the name of a popular song at the time by Lys Gauty, which was also inserted into the film, replacing parts of Jaubert's score.

When L'Atalante was released in September 1934, it was a commercial failure and received poor reviews from critics, who called it "amateurish, self-indulgent and morbid."

In October 1934, shortly after the film had finished its initial run at French movie theaters, Vigo died at the age of 29 in the arms of his wife Lydou.

In Italy, Luigi Comencini obtained a personal copy of L'Atalante and would screen it for his friends, calling it "a masterpiece capable of shaking up any notion about cinema the average spectator might have.

"[30] Film critic Georges Sadoul praised "the astounding quality of poetry it engenders from a world superficially ordinary and drab.

[34] Other films to pay tribute to L'Atalante include Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris (1972), Leos Carax's Les Amants du Pont-Neuf (1991), and Jean-Luc Godard's In Praise of Love (2001).

[45] Musician Steve Adey wrote a song called "Dita Parlo" on his 2012 studio album The Tower of Silence.