Mise au Point (Oct 2018)
A propos the Puppeteer – Jean Vigo and the Cinema of Automata
Abstract
This essay focuses on two central elements of the cinema of Jean Vigo that have received little attention to date: Vigo’s use of puppets, manikins, and automata as a central part in his mise-en-scène, and Vigo’s status as a transitional film maker negotiating the threshold from silence to sound. I argue that Vigo’s puppets often function as suggestive figurations of desire, capitalist consumption, and automated thinking, and hence variously comment on the behavior of their human counterparts and the political and economic system they inhabit. Secondarily, Vigo inflects these associations with a strong anti-colonial subtext of repression and exploitation by laying bare the unspoken political dimensions of French colonial rule and the modernist cult(ure) of primitivism and sexual liberation en vogue in 1920s France. The symbolic surcharge of Vigo’s puppets is, further, reinscribed in the audio-visual synergies of his films. Situated on the cusp of film’s transition from silence to sound, Vigo develops a complex register of intonation that engages the modernist media ecology and, in effect, interrogates the status of cinema as a synch-sound spectacle. His puppets and automata can be understood not as convenient leftovers of silent-era film-making, but as dumb dummies resisting the emerging commercialization of sound and its perceived narrowing of aesthetic possibilities (certainly among the avant-garde). Bodies without voice, they vocalize their inherent cinematicity not through the detour of sound, but through their contorted materiality, facial grotesqueness and jerky mobility.
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