Jean Vigo | Zéro de conduit (Zero for Conduct) / 1933

the wild ones

 

Jean Vigo (scenarist and director) Zéro de conduit (Zero for Conduct) / 1933

From the very first scene of Jean Vigo’s short feature, Zero for Conduct, the director establishes the battlegrounds as two young boys traveling by train to return to their boarding school take out their new “toys”—in a sort of menacing version of “I can do better than you”—before pulling out cigars, lighting up and smoking—all in the presence of a sleeping adult, who, as the train stops falls to the floor, described by the boys as a “dead man.” The sleeping man is their new teacher, who, although more spirited than the soulless freaks who also teach at the boys’ school, is clearly, in their minds, already dead.

     The two boys, Caussat (Louis Lefebre) and Colin (Gilbert Pruchon), join their friend Bruel (Coco Golstein) and a new “pretty” boy, Tabard (based, so it is reported on Vigo himself)—ogled and touched by several teachers—who befriends them, to immediately plan a revolt. The various “professors” include the dwarf headmaster, a slimy supervisor who follows the children about to spy on them and steals their possessions, an obese chalk-covered science teacher, and mindless housemaster, whom the boys, in their later orgiastic march of rebellion, tie to his bed, upend it and, symbolically, crucify him. Only the new teacher, who entertains them with drawings and a Chaplinesque strut around the school yards, shows any possibility of offering them an education.

     Through most of this 41-minute film, the boys do little but conspire, as they, like school boys everywhere, pass notes, secretly meet, magically escape from one teacher’s attention as they march through the city, and are awarded seemingly endless “zeros for conduct,” restricting them to the school even during weekends.

      Yet, by framing everything through the eyes of the boys, Vigo creates a magical landscape which seems to be always fulminating with real violence and a sense of wonderment. The ease in which the boys slip in and out of beds, climb into and of mysterious windows, and simply mock their superiors behind their backs is in stark opposition to the freakish inadequacies of the adults, making the film seem both comic and slightly horrifying at the very same moment.

       The revolt is planned for the school’s commemoration day, but gets underway, apparently, the night before as what begins as a pillow fight among the school’s boys suddenly turns into a mock procession—not unlike the mardi gras celebration in the director’s À Propos aux Nice—as the camera goes into slow motion, a snowfall of feathers streaming down upon everyone. It ends, appropriately, with the crucifixion I described above.

       The commemoration ceremony of the next morning, presided over the Toulouse-Lautrec lookalike, seems to have no children in attendance, merely stuffed dummies, representing various French dignitaries. The young foursome is seen moving, by rooftop, off into the distance seemingly having escaped their insane oppression.  The freshness of his vision, combined with Vigo’s obvious distaste for authority, helped to get this film immediately banned after its showing in 1933 in Paris for “creating disturbances and hindering the maintenance of order.” It would not be rediscovered until 1945, and was not shown again until 1946, twelve years after Vigo’s death. But its influence has been extensive, with François Truffaut paying homage to it in his The 400 Blows and Lindsay Anderson using its structure for his If….  

 

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The other day, almost a decade after writing the above, I watched Zero for Conduct again two more times and sat through a rather unrevealing Criterion commentary by Michael Temple, all in the curiosity of it being listed on a couple of LGBTQ film lists. I then reread the commentary above, and was surprised that I had done, I believe, a fairly decent job of describing the film, although having missed nearly all of its sexual matter.

     Were I to completely to rewrite it today, I would probably make far more of the general Dadaist tone of the work, its anarchist roots—Temple does remind us that Vigo’s father was a significant French Anarchist, who was probably assassinated in prison by rightists—and I would most certainly detail the numerous situations in which the teachers and administrators behave more like children as the boys plot and strategize like experienced adults. I would also probably reiterate the simple joy and humor of the work, even if the first time I perhaps was a bit uneasy with the student’s rebellion, having myself been a teacher and being a son of a superintendent of schools. We side completely with the boys and wish Surveillant Huguet (Jean Dasté) could have more fully joined in, a true child at heart whose wondrous ability to stand on his head at his desk gave his students more joy than they might have before experienced in a class.

      What I completely missed however is, in its anarchist spirit, just how much nudity and sexual allusion Vigo allowed his young boys. Much of the entire first scene where the two boys, Causset and Bruel meet up in the train on their back to school, for example, begins as they show off their new trinkets and toys, Causset demonstrating a small hand air ball which he then tucks into his crotch as he the Bruel continue showing off their other new treasures before, finally, taking out cigars which they light and smoke. The ball between his crotch visually appears against his naked thighs throughout this scene as if it were the boy’s penis, which takes on even further sexual implications when the two meet up their cigars in space, creating further suggestions of a phallic interchange. The scene is a long one and hard to ignore—if you’ll excuse my unintended boyish puns.

     In the same manner of this visual “joke,” at several points in the film Vigo makes use of bathroom and bedroom humor, showing off the young male buttock as blankets are pulled on lazy

sleepers and toilet cubicles are quickly pulled open by the adults checking on their young charges.

The partial nudity is an intrusion, like everything else these children must suffer, not only on their privacy, but even the dignity of their sleep and bathroom use. There is hardly a moment that any boys might describe in which they experience a sense of solitude or silence, two of the most necessary tools in learning. The children are literary stripped naked by their superiors whenever possible.

     Only in one instance does it become celebratory. When the students finally begin their revolution by instigation complete bedroom chaos beginning with a pillow fight, they end it with a celebration procession, an almost sacred like affair as they put one boy in his night-shirt upon a chair, revealing is full penis in the process sticking out from beneath his nightshirt. Here we see almost a Bacchic celebration, something so vital and exciting that the male nudity seems a natural aspect of the event, although obviously this was probably the final straw for the censors who banned the film in its entirety.

 

     Closely related to the intrusions upon the boys’ private parts by the administrators in a near pedophilic scene by the heavyset teacher with a chalky coat. He clearly is attracted to Tabard, the boy described as “pretty” or at other times as a “sissy.” Not only does he rub his hand across his hair, but later attempts to touch his fingers and hands, which so annoys the child that he, the seemingly least outspoken of the boys, screams out the word “merde” (“shit”) and later when asked to recant merely repeats it emphatically, applying it to the teachers and principal themselves.

 

      Tabard and Bruel also share a boy-love relationship throughout the film, for which Tabard is later called into the headmaster’s office in an attempt to dissuade him from continuing it. But by the end of the film, the seemingly innocent boy who, at first, was not even included in the revolutionary club, is seen even more deeply active in the final upheaval and perhaps even more devoted to Bruel, suggesting the possibility of sexual activity which the adults have attempted to deny him.

      Indeed, Vigo’s short work is quite a sexual and even a gay work that refuses to banish the subject of sexual vitality from the mental and spiritual revolutions that the boys are also undertaking. And in that sense, it is one of the most positive queer statements of the 1930s.

 

Los Angeles, January 20, 2013, revised Los Angeles, September 23, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2022).