"I have always considered Jean Vigo and Robert Flaherty close relatives. Between Nanook and L’Atalante, you can place practically all cinema except Bunuel’s L’age d’or."

"I have always considered Jean Vigo and Robert Flaherty close relatives. Between Nanook and L’Atalante, you can place practically all cinema except Bunuel’s L’age d’or."

"I have always considered Jean Vigo and Robert Flaherty close relatives. Between Nanook and L’Atalante, you can place practically all cinema except Bunuel’s L’age d’or."

"I have always considered Jean Vigo and Robert Flaherty close relatives. Between Nanook and L’Atalante, you can place practically all cinema except Bunuel’s L’age d’or."

"Channel Jean Renoir through Luis Buñuel—voilà!—Jean Vigo. This, his only feature, renders the mundane magical, the sad humorous, and the flesh transcendent as it portrays young newlyweds and their life on a river barge. “All day long it’s either smooching or squabbling,” laments a companion. And so it is in this poignant, poetic paean to the beauty and tribulations of married love."

"L’Atalante from Jean Vigo. I discovered this film when I started to have growing interest in movies. That movie is from the 1930s. It was shot with very little money, and the director was sick. I mean, it’s pure poetry. This movie, it’s a very simple story, and you have Michel Simon, who plays an amazing character. It’s just a great combination of a vision that’s close to surrealism and a Grecian film look. It’s extremely touching."

"I recently picked up Jean Vigo's dreamy 1934 story of a honeymoon couple heading to Paris on a barge. It's still startling and would have been way out on its own in 1934. Also included on the Artificial Eye DVD is his earlier short Zéro de conduite which was banned for years in France. An anarchic tale of kids taking over a boarding school. You can see how much Truffaut picked up from here and it was a direct influence on the 60s Lindsay Anderson film If. Vigo died young and L'Atalante was his only complete feature."