À propos de Nice

Even though it is clear enough that the filmmakers (Kaufman being the brother of Dziga Vertov) want to form a contrast between scenes of fun and leisure and scenes of poverty and suffering in order to present “a documented point of view”, it is still hard for a viewer watching from the distance of almost a century to see this ingenious and experimental collage of often joyful and carnivalesque images, emanating spectrally from another age, from the viewpoint that Vigo explicitly intended, as quoted in the biography by Salles Gomes (1998), p. 68:

“In this film, by showing certain basic aspects of a city, a way of life is put on trial. In fact, as soon as the atmosphere of Nice and the kind of life lived there – and not only there, unfortunately – has been suggested,, the film develops into a generalized view of the vulgar pleasures that come under the sign of the grotesque, of the flesh, and of death. These pleasures are the last gasps of a society so lost in its escapism that it sickens you and makes you sympathetic to a revolutionary solution.”