Live Musical Soundtrack by UC Berkeley Student DJs!
Presented with the BAM/PFA Student Committee

(Zéro de conduite). What better film for an assault by young DJs than this irreverent glimpse of a student revolt brewing inside a boarding school? This is one of only two features made by Jean Vigo, who died at age twenty-nine, but who managed to create a personal cinema of ferocious visual invention. Told from the perspective of the students, whose innate unruliness is at odds with their tyrannical tutors, Vigo's vivid and uncompromising rendering of a boys' school is filled with adults in grotesque caricature who represent the stifling forces of socialization. Central to the student revolt is a poetically executed pillow fight in which the youthful jubilation is exquisitely matched by Vigo's liberated imagemaking, a surreal procession of floating feathers and anarchic upheaval. Its scathing account of French education got the film banned for almost fifteen years, and you can see why—Vigo never did anything by the book.

—Steve Seid

• Written by Vigo. Photographed by Boris Kaufman. With Jean Dasté, Louis Lefebvre, Robert Le Flon, Delphin. (41 mins, English subtitles and synopsis provided, B&W, 35mm, From Janus/Criterion Collection)

Preceded by short:
Taris (Jean Vigo, France, 1931). Champion swimmer Jean Taris demonstrates the bubbly basics of pool-bound propulsion, then playfully plunges into an underwater world of wonder. With live accompaniment by the UC Jazz Ambassadorial Quintet: Amy Shen, Jack Tang, Karl Evangelista, Kylan Schroeder, and Yanik Jayram. (9 mins, B&W, 16mm, PFA Collection)

• (Total running time: 50 mins)