Themes: Mischievous Children, Boarding School Life, Generation Gap
Main Cast: Jean Dasté, Delphin, Robert Le Flon, Louis Lefebvre
Release Year: 1933
Country: FR
Run Time: 49 minutes
Plot
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.... ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
Review
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). ~ Lucia Bozzola, All Movie Guide
