L’Atalante, directed by Jean Vigo (1934)

A surreal and poetic love story set on a barge on the Seine River in the 1920’s. Juliette, the woman in white/ the bride/ the eternal feminine, is leaving the village/ the shore/ society, to join her groom, Jean, the captain of L’Atalante, (the name of the Greek goddess who was turned into a lion), and the name of the barge which is to become the couple’s new home.
They journey along the waterway, tame as a canal/wild as a river, towards Paris, which represents both civilization and corruption. Onboard is Père Jules, the first mate, the Dionysian primitive with his chants and tattoos, his menagerie of cats and exotic collection of world artifacts. Juliette has been thrust into the cramped and stifling world of the masculine. Will she survive as its muse? Juliette becomes restless. Jean’s actions are fruitless. She leaves the barge to wander Paris. He continues down the Seine. She wanders the shore, he drifts downstream. Finally, lonely and alone, they reunite. The feminine is reunited with the masculine; the world of myth continues its endless voyage.

L’Atalante is a psychological dreamscape and one of cinema’s earliest works of art. The bride in the white dress walking along the barge at twilight, her image floating in the water as Jean dives in looking ‘for the face of the one you love.’ Fifty years since Dostoevsky created the psychological novel, Vigo has brought the same forces to bear in cinematic expression.
Jean Vigo died in 1934 at the age of twenty nine. His anarchist idealism was based on unification through collaboration of free individuals. His only feature, L’Atalante, is less about plot and storytelling and more about radiance, sensuality, love, chaos, disorder, the Apollonian and Dionysian, and the intoxication of desire. His images provide freedom, stimulation, and the ethereal possibilities of living in the dream that the cinema promises to provide. If you love love and the cinema, L’Atalante is a must see.