Jean Vigot was born in Paris on 26 April 1905. He was the son of the militant anarchist Eugène Bonaventure de Vigo - his pseudonym was Miguel Almereyda, an anagram of the expression "this shit" (French y'a la merde) - and his wife Emily Clero. Vigo-father published a satirical newspaper called "Red Riding Hood", then for supporting Germany was accused of treason and imprisoned, where he was strangled under unclear circumstances on August 13, 1917.
Since childhood, Jean was in poor health and therefore was forced to stay for a long time in hospitals and sanatoriums. Since his parents were involved in politics, he was raised by relatives and family friends and attended boarding schools under the assumed name Jean Salais. In 1922, the seventeen-year-old Vigo was reunited with his mother and in 1926 studied at the Sorbonne under his real name. On January 24, 1929, he married Elizaveta Lozinskaya, the daughter of a Polish manufacturer. In 1931, their daughter Luce was born.
Interested in cinema, Vigo in 1928 worked as an assistant to the famous cameraman Leon-Henri Bürel, helping him on the set of the film “Venus”. Then, after inheriting 100,000 francs after the death of a relative, he purchased a used film camera and in 1930 began work on his first film. It was a silent documentary short called “About Nice”, which revealed Vigo’s ability to capture the natural beauty of reality and give banal scenes a stylized poetic sound.
His second film was the documentary surreal short “Taris, or Swimming”, released in 1931, where the main character was the swimmer-champion Jean Taris. In 1933, the full-length film Zero for Behavior followed. It told about the life of a boarding school for boys and her students who rebelled against the school order and teachers, whose cartoon images were clearly borrowed from Vigo’s childhood memories. This film was censored on the shelf, and the restrictions were not lifted until 1945.
In 1934, the director shot his fourth and last picture, the unhurried melodrama Atalanta. The plot of the film was simple and described the story of two newlyweds, a village girl Juliet (Dita Parlo) and skipper Jean (Jean Daste). After the wedding, they sail on Jean's barge called "Atalanta" through the canals of France to Paris. When Juliet, despite her husband’s ban, runs away to look at the city, Jean, angry, decides to sail away without his wife. However, then the separation begins to cause him great suffering. Fortunately, his assistant, an eccentric old man and cat lover, Jules, seeks out Juliet, brings her back, and the young are reunited. This unassuming story, saturated with lyricism and poetic motifs thanks to Vigo’s talent, had a great influence on the directors of the French New Wave.
The cameraman of all four Vigo films was Boris Kaufman, brother of Soviet film director Dziga Vertov.
Unfortunately, the talent of the director was not destined to be fully revealed. Less than a month after the premiere of Atalanta, on October 5, 1934, he died of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-nine. In 1951, the Jean Vigo Prize was established in France, and since then it has been awarded annually to young directors. Among the winners of the award are Claude Chabrol (was awarded in 1959 for the film “Pretty Serge”), Jean-Luc Godard (was awarded in 1960 for the film “In the Last Breath”), Chris Marker (for the film “The Runway”, 1963), F.J. Ossang (for the film “Price”), etc.