At the end of the 1940s, the Cinémathèque française acquired an ensemble of outtakes of L’Atalante. It was first inventoried by Panfilo Colaprete and Vigo’s first biographer, Paulo Emilio Sales Gomes, who already back then declared that an “ideal edit” of the film was impossible. Langlois himself gave it up: “I have seen some superb things that Vigo had cut, because what he was striving for was total simplicity. I have made a version, into which I inserted some scenes out of pure curiosity, to see what effect they would have. Magnificent, declared those who saw them. But it wasn’t what Vigo wanted”.

In his 1950 restoration, Langlois thus confined himself to inserting two shots in the most plausible points possible: the newlyweds walking around haystacks, and that (inspired by L’Âge d’or, as Colaprete noted) of Jean licking a block of ice.

Many viewers have been struck, and with good reason, by the beauty of these images outtakes when they were edited into various restored versions, such as Soviet filmmakers Otar Iosseliani and Andrej Tarkovskij after seeing the Langlois print, or British mythographer Marina Warner, after seeing the 1990 restoration. Nonetheless, others commented on “the overenthusiastic tendency of the 1990 team to include… every piece of material available” (Michael Temple, Vigo, Manchester University Press, Manchester-New York, 2005).

Now, it is finally possible for us to discover, together with the restoration of the film in its pristine form, precisely what material was shot and then discarded – material that both illustrates the story of the working process, and the nature of the director’s inspiration.

Bernard Eisenschitz