Zero for Conduct (1933)
Directed by Jean Vigo
In a repressive boarding school with rigid rules of behavior, four boys decide to rebel against the director on a celebration day.
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What critics compared Zero for Conduct to
It is a lyrical poetic realism that is central to two influential films for The 400 Blows - Vigo's Zero for Conduct (1933) and Rossellini's Germany, Year Zero (1947) - and significantly informs Truffaut's hypnotically moving debut feature.
Nowadays, that treatment seems more than a little quaint (much like the savage reception accorded the delightful and achingly beautiful The Rules of the Game , six years later), largely because of the outsized influence this poetic little 41 minute snip of a film has had on subsequent film history (among others, François Truffaut lifted shots intact for his The 400 Blows ), rendering its then-shocking treatment of rebellious little kids into appealing cliché, and all but guaranteeing that a modern viewer is going to be taken by its marvelous visual poetry than by its outdated revolutionary content.
Many filmmakers have been inspired by Vigo, including Jean Renoir, Francois Truffaut (whose The 400 Blows was a tribute to this film), Lindsay Anderson (whose If... was a remake), and even Neil Jordan, who must have seen Zero for Conduct in order to make The Butcher Boy .
“The Florida Project” has many antecedents: Francois Truffaut’s “The 400 Blows,” for one, and literary exposes of poverty like Betty Smith’s “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,” but also classics of comic kid anarchy like “The Little Rascals” series, Jean Vigo’s “Zero for Conduct,” and Louis Malle’s “Zazie dans la Metro.”
The mix of those ingredients yields a disarmingly high-concept cocktail: think of it as Zero for Conduct by way of Tenacious D.
Films like Zero for Conduct, If . . .