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 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….
*
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.
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).
