From the Vault: L'Atalante

Presented on a 35mm print from the Film Studies Center's collection. 

“Don’t you know you can see your beloved’s face in the water?… It’s true. When I was little, I saw things like that. And last year, I saw your face in the water.”

Juliette, newly wed, abandons her life in a provincial French village to join her seafaring husband, Jean,  on his barge, L’Atalante, for an unconventional honeymoon; in tow are his crewmates and a not insignificant posse of scruffy river cats. “All day long it’s either smoochin’ or squabblin’,” laments Père Jules, the ornery second-in-command, lazily observing the married couple’s early growing pains. Once the crew docks in Paris, the couple’s woes escalate; while their disagreements appear petty to the audience, they quickly drive a very real rift between the two. Juliette, who has been forced to hold her own in this microcosm of eccentric gentlemen—equipped with little more than a pair of sleepy eyes, a polka-dot bathrobe, and a dream—quickly reaches a breaking point, running away from the barge to freely indulge in Paris. Jean, scorned by her dismissal, lifts anchor and departs, leaving Juliette to fend for herself, and the audience in disbelief—can their love survive this fissure?

Jean Vigo’s only feature film, this unconventional fairy tale (made more fantastical by its dazzling underwater double exposure sequences and a conservative dose of mysticism) has long been a staple of the University of Chicago’s History of International Cinema II courses. Our in-house 35mm print has screened publicly at the late Cinefamily in Los Angeles, the Anthology Film Archives in New York, Cornell Cinema in Ithaca, and the Block Cinema at Northwestern; but never before has it screened for an event at the University of Chicago. This romance of errors is the perfect cure for the late winter blues—a print not to be missed. (Jean Vigo, France, 1934, 89 minutes, 35mm)

This event is free and open to the public. Doors open thirty minutes prior to showtime.