One year before his longstanding feature-film achievement L'Atalante (1934), Jean Vigo's enchanting anarchich short masterpiece has a huge heart placed in the middle of it all, despite the negativity in the depiction of the boarding school, the meanness of the school authorities and harsh conditions of the students.

Correct observations have been made pointing out the fact that the spirit of this film was an influence on Lindsay Anderson's If.... (1968), which is actually considered as a remake by several sources, including IMDB, as both circle around the intentions of the students to organize an uprising, and both have key scenes which visual techniques highlight the intensity of the moment (the pillow fight sequence was extraordinary). Still, this one has…

Honestly, for a 41 minute film, this was a bit of a chore to get through. Maybe it's because I watched it near midnight but I've watched many films at odd times of the night, so I'm not quite sure.

Actually, I think a lot of things were done well, or at least interestingly in the film. For one, the caricaturistic authority figures in Zero for Conduct. We have one seemingly omniscient house-master with a penchant for snooping through the boys belongings. A headmaster, who is probably shorter than Danny DeVito, and probably has a voice squeakier than a mouse. And a teacher, who fancies himself somewhat of a clown -- complete with Chaplin impersonations and spontaneous handstands.

Even the…

[made 1933]
If... and Dead Poet's Society were directly inspired by scenes from this film, and it also influenced The 400 Blows. Yet it's almost unknown among non-cinephiles. (I love two of those films and quite like DPS, and hadn't heard its name until today when I read an article about L'atalante mentioning that Jean Vigo's entire filmography could easily be watched in one afternoon.)

The school here is not as brutal or regimented as the institution in If... but I still find I can't write this review without making it a response to this one which says that the children's punishments seem quite justified.

Zéro de conduite is told from the children's point of view - though I think…

War is declared! Down with monitors and punishment! Long live rebellion!

Anarchism as form and content. Much in the same way that the anarchist ideology is commonly misunderstood and mistaken for chaos etc., this film is also seen by many as very loosely structured. The free anarchistic spirit is all over it, no doubt, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t structurally sound, as I only found out in my third viewing, it is much tighter than it appears at first. It’s especially illuminating to compare to À propos de Nice. Both films end with the triumph of the revolution/rebellion, specifically with Vigo’s trademark low-angle shots, with the camera looking up, in propose at the tower going seemingly past the clouds,…

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Closing out the Vigo set—would easily be my least favorite if TARIS had literally anything to say ; even at only nine minutes, that’s formally more impressive than this, which is still “fine” by measurable standards, but far from superlative in any of them, esp. storytelling, where it feels like a quasi-abstract precursor to e.g. THE 400 BLOWS, a theme built from upon mischievous youth and systematic “oppression” as picked from the flotsam of memory in some adult’s head. Positions the kids as more of a force to be reckoned with -- not so much helpless little beings who’re caught under the stranglehold of educational and biological superiors -- which is where much of the abstraction lies, so it’s…

Kind of unfathomable, kind of incredible? It’s dishonest to say it was ahead of its time cause, while it definitely informed a lot of great art later on, it seems to me to exist almost outside any notable canon. Ahead of its time maybe in that we haven’t caught up to some of the stuff it tries to pull off?  I don’t know, but it affected me all the same. 

Impossible not to think of Abbas Kiarostami’s incredible short Orderly or Disorderly, which i’m suprised has stuck so dominantly in my brain for as long as it has (although i shouldn’t be...it’s Abbas). Zero for Conduct is like if someone took a magnifying glass (possibly with the sun behind it)…