À Propos de Nice ({Pathé-Natan, 1930)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The two other films TCM showed as part of its “city symphonies” showcase were considerably shorter: Jean Vigo’s Á Propos de Nice (1930) and Manhatta by Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand (1921). Ironically, the Vigo film begins how Berlin: Symphony of a Great City ended – with fireworks, or at least one firework instead of a whole display of them. Vigo is one of the most haunting figures in film history: an active anarchist who during his short career (he made just four films before dying of complications from tuberculosis in 1934 – and only his last film, L’Atalante, about a working-class romantic triangle set aboard a barge on the Seine, was feature-length) created some pretty astonishing images. Á Propos de Nice (the title simply means “About Nice”) was Vigo’s first film – though his cinematographer, Boris Kaufman, is credited as co-director (with Vigo credited solo as writer and Kaufman alone as director of photography); his second was a three-minute short about a French swimmer, Taris, His third film, and in some ways his most audacious, was Zero for Conduct, a 1933 film about a student rebellion at a French private school; it was reissued in the 1960’s during an age of real-life student revolts and remade by British director Lindsay Anderson as If … (1968).

Vigo’s politics are readily apparent in Á Propos de Nice; whereas Ruttmann occasionally hinted at a class critique in his movie, Vigo goes all out to contrast the rich people who come to Nice, a vacation resort town on the Riviera in the south of France, and divert themselves with gambling (the casino in Nice seems to have been built as a replica of the even more famous one farther down the Riviera in Monte Carlo), watching races (horse, auto and boat), and having fabulous meals, while all these pleasures are made possible by the behind-the-scenes work of poorly paid, anonymous proletarians who keep the outdoor restaurants and indoor resorts and casinos clean and stocked with food and other necessities. The one defect in Á Propos de Nice is it really doesn’t have a structure; whereas Ruttmann’s film took a day in the life of its city and thereby told a reasonably coherent story even in an abstract movie, Vigo’s (and Kaufman’s) just keeps cutting back and forth between the rich and the not-so-rich without much of a sense of continuity or plot. Nonetheless, Á Propos de Nice contains some breathtakingly beautiful sequences as well as scenes of historical interest (like the legendary cars seen in the auto races), and the overall effect is breathtaking.

One problem watching movies like this is that we’re not seeing and hearing what the filmmakers intended; even in the silent era movies were always shown with some sort of musical accompaniment – a full orchestra in the largest big-city theatres (and Allan Dwan, director of Douglas Fairbanks’ 1922 Robin Hood, recalled traveling with the film as it opened in the various major cities of the U.S. and rehearsing with the in-person orchestra to make sure they got the sound effects right), an organ in the next rung of theatres, a string trio in the smaller theatres and a single piano in the grind houses. Some directors hired composers to write original scores for films that were published in various reductions depending on how big the theatres were and how many musicians they had available, and frequently these scores quoted pre-existing music the directors thought appropriate. D. W. Griffith intended the climax of his racist masterpiece The Birth of a Nation (1915) – the heroes of the Ku Klux Klan ride to save Southern white women the indignity of being raped by watermelon-eating, craps-playing armed Southern Blacks who had been given voting rights they didn’t deserve by white Northern carpetbaggers – to be accompanied by Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries,” essentially one racist artistic genius paying tribute to another.

At least the restored version of Berlin: Symphony of a Great City was accompanied by a full orchestra playing a score that, though not the original one Ruttmann commissioned from Edmund Meisel (who also wrote the scores for Russian director Sergei Eisenstein’s masterpieces Battleship Potemkin and October), at least came close enough in style it sounded right and avoided any of the annoying anachronisms that had plagued the new score by Arthur Barrow Universal just slapped onto Paul Leni’s last film, The Last Warning (1929). The restoration of Á Propos de Nice is accompanied by a solo accordion, backed only by percussion, and while some of the cues are nicely ironic and fit Vigo’s and Kaufman’s overall approach, the single sonority gets oppressive after a while without either dialogue or some other sort of music to break the monotony.