L'Atalante

L'Atalante (1934) is Jean Vigo's landmark of French poetic realism, available to watch online on iFILM. Newly married Jean, a young barge captain, brings his village bride Juliette aboard the L'Atalante for a working honeymoon along the French canals, accompanied by a crew of two: a cabin boy and the weathered, eccentric Père Jules (Michel Simon), who keeps a cabin full of cats and curiosities from a lifetime at sea.

Juliette wants Paris. Jean wants to keep her to himself. Their first real argument sends her ashore in the city — and she and the barge part ways. What follows is a portrait of longing stripped of melodrama, told mostly through image and movement rather than dialogue.

Vigo shot the film in 1934 and died of tuberculosis at twenty-nine, leaving only four completed works. L'Atalante is his longest, and cinematographer Boris Kaufman's underwater sequence — Jean imagining Juliette's face beneath the surface — is among the most imitated shots in film history. Stream L'Atalante (1934) online on iFILM.