Zéro de conduite

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"Et moi, je vous dis Merde!" cries out a primary school student at his teacher. Teachers, at this level, are not researchers in any way. While being a teacher offers a high social standing, after one qualifies as such, one is hardly ever expected to refresh his or her own perspective. Jean Vigo, the director and the scenarist of L'Atalante has his own unique place in the history of filmmaking; and in the Nouvelle Vague in particular. This film came as a bit of a surprise for me after his realistic poetry expressed in visual form with L'Atalante. My apologies to my readers for watching this film so late (in life).

Students sit in classrooms sit quietly and do exactly what the headmaster wants them to do. The headmaster, the scary word of all childhoods, is a character in this Vigo film in the body of a dwarf. This powerful repressive figure looks and feels a bit like Hitler. He's the one on the left in the picture above. The hats make the males in the front row feel better about themselves before the kids give a performance. And the row before that is constituted of puppets only. They smile. They are a bit like the mask in the V for vendetta. I haven't developed a taste for that genre of film, though, not just yet.

After individual kids having been punished by some teachers, they decide to unite. At every instance of critical thinking, the kids are told  that they will be punished by a zero grade for behavior ('zéro de conduit' (fr), or 'zero for conduct' (eng) or 'hareket notu' (in tr)). This film is so much like the Turkish film of a classroom of friends (called 'Hababam Sinifi'). In the Turkish movie, no one actually is successful. but success, after all, is the very notion which has created many a system of hierarchy and lack of thought. In Zero for Conduct, the kids finally unite in a spirit of festivity: feels like the glamorous revolution of kindergartners. The little natural born philosophers of this class cry out, over and over again, 'Je vous dis Merde'. Merde.