Taris, roi de l'eau (1931)
Directed by Jean Vigo

Film Review

Jean Vigo's second film is partly a homage to French swimming champion Jean Taris (who appears in the film as himself) but mainly as an experiment into the possibilities of underwater film photography.

Despite its short runtime, Taris is beautifully filmed and provided a source of inspiration to future film makers, most notably Jean Cocteau.

The experience that Vigo himself gained whilst making this film enabled him to realise the famous underwater dream sequence in his subsequent film L'Atalante, one of the most captivating and extraordinary scenes in cinematographic history.

Film Synopsis

French swimming champion Jean Taris is the subject of this short documentary, an early commission for the film director Jean Vigo after he completed his innovative first documentary À propos de Nice in 1930.  Rather than present a conventional portrait of a popular sportsman, Vigo opts for a far more poetic approach, using a range of visual devices - close-ups, slow-motion and freeze-frames - and sound effects to stress the power and grace of the freestyle swimmer's sinewy body as it rips through the water as easily as any marine creature.  The remarkably fluid underwater photography employed by Vigo was groundbreaking for its time and has its own unique impressionistic poetry, anticipating the most memorable sequences in his greatest work, L'Atalante, made just before his death in 1934.  Taris, roi de l'eau is the most sensual and mysterious of Vigo's films, a wholehearted tribute not only to one great swimmer but also to the beauty and mystique of the human form.