Zero for Conduct

Overview

The shortest of French filmmaker Jean Vigo's two feature-length films, Zero for Conduct (Zero de Conduite) is also arguably his most influential. The overtly autobiographical plotline takes place at a painfully strict boys' boarding school, presided over by such petit-bourgeous tyrants as a discipline-dispensing dwarf. The students revolt against the monotony of their daily routine by erupting into a outsized pillow fight. Their final assault occurs during a prim-and-proper school ceremony, wherein the headmasters are bombarded with fruit. Like all of Vigo's works, Zero for Conduct was greeted with outrage by the "right" people. Thanks to pressure from civic and educational groups, this exhilaratingly anarchistic film was banned from public exhibition until 1945. Among the future filmmakers influenced by Zero for Conduct was Lindsay Anderson, who unabashedly used the Vigo film as blueprint for his own anti-establishment exercise If....

Product Details

Release Date:	04/27/2010
UPC:	8809116454132
Original Release:	1933
Source:	Imports
Language:	English
Sales rank:	46,792

Cast & Crew

Performance Credits

Jean Daste	Supt. Hugnet
Louis Lefebvre	Caussat
Gilbert Pruchon	Actor
Coco Goldstein	Actor
le nain Delfin	Actor
Robert Le Flem	Actor
Louis de Gonzague-Frick	Actor
Gilbert Pluchon	Actor
Gérard de Bédarieux	Actor
Constantin Goldstein-Kehler	Actor
Robert Le Flon	Actor
Delphin	Principal
Constantin Kelber	Actor
L. de Gonzague-Frick	Prefect
Rava Diligent	Fireman
Du Veron	Supt. Dec-de-Gaz
Léon Larive	Sciences teacher
Mme. Emile	Mother Haricot
Maurice Jaubert	Composer

Technical Credits

Jean Vigo

Jean Vigo

Director,Screenwriter,Producer

Editorial Reviews

A brash link between 1920s Surrealist films and 1930s poetic realism, Jean Vigo's 44-minute Zéro de conduite (1933) became an influential paean to youthful freedom. Drawing on Vigo's years at boarding school after the murder of his anarchist father, his first fiction film celebrated a schoolboy revolt against their repressive instructors and midget principal. Alternately comic, serious, dreamlike, and grotesque, the film contrasts the imagination and energy of the boys -- with their games, plans, and a drawing that becomes animated -- to the Peeping Tom/candy-stealing teachers who mostly hand out the title's zeroes for conduct, except for one whimsically Chaplinesque teacher (Jean Dasté). Shot by Boris Kaufman, the now-famous pillow fight that precedes the rebellion becomes a slow-motion reverie of vivacious children and snow-like floating feathers; the sky literally seems to be the limit after the boys successfully disrupt the stiff Alumni Day celebration with a rooftop assault of empty cans. With its undeniably anti-authority message, Zéro de conduite was banned by French censors until after the Liberation in 1944. Celebrated for its anarchic spirit and stylistic boldness, the film especially inspired the French New Wave directors, and it was the direct antecedent of François Truffaut's The 400 Blows (1959) and Lindsay Anderson's If. . . (1968).

All Movie Guide - Lucia Bozzola