A Film Canon

More than any film that I have seen to date, Zero For Conduct caters itself to a cult demographic, initiating us into the diabolic antics of a group of young schoolboys, whose defining act is to barricade themselves inside the boarding house and proclaim their independence from its rooftops. At a certain level, Vigo aims to shock, most obviously through his pointed inclusion of nudity, emphasised in a slow-motion backwards flip towards the end. But this is all conveyed through an endearing, childlike lens that suggests nothing so much as a director mischievously baring his backside, and finds its most poetic expression in the characterisation of adults as stranger, or more exotic, kinds of children - from the tyrannical headmaster, played by a dwarf, to the new teacher, whose gymnastic and romantic escapades take on a superhuman quality in the eyes of the boys. It also contributes to the real transgression of the film - Vigo's willingness to engage with the sexual economy of boarding school life, evident in his sympathy for the various protective, homosocial understandings that arise between older and younger boys, as well as his examination of the erotic - and occasionally paedophilic - proximity of student and teacher.