TARIS

Jean Vigo’s short documentary is a portrait of great French swimming champion Jean Taris, depicting his talents as he performs different acts. The film is notable for the many innovative techniques that Vigo uses, including close ups and freeze frames of the swimmer’s body.

Ostensibly a documentary portrait of champion swimmer Jean Taris, this amphibious short is enriched by Jean Vigo’s dazzling formal imagination. As playful as it is audacious, Taris’s underwater photography was pioneering, and set the stage for the later subaquatic reveries of L’Atalante.