They all realized that Charlot had reached certain cinematic potentials, they all caught the subversive, oneiric and poetic dimension immediately.  The influence of that character and its author on L’Atalante is not recognized quite as often. It is a more discrete presence, but more diffused and meaningful because it goes beyond a simple quote, inspiring a wish, a body, a gesture, sometimes in hidden ways, sometimes in flashes. Of Chaplin’s universe, we immediately see interest in marginalized characters, the exceptions to the rule, characters who live on the outskirts and dream (like Juliette) of the “city lights”, despite risking “a dog’s life”. Juliette has a much opposed project, the same one always shared by Charlot: to be stable instead of drifting, to have a house like everyone else, to put down the anchor. […] Thus, when Juliette and Jean embrace and fall to the ground, and we see the last image of the water, we are surprised to see the reflection of the ending to Modern Times, where Paulette Goddard and Charlie Chaplin walk hand-in-hand towards the horizon.

Bernard Benoliel, in Nathalie Bourgeois, B. Benoliel, Stéfani de Loppinot, L’Atalante. Un film de Jean Vigo, Paris, Cinémathèque Français / Pôle Méditerranéen d’Education Cinématographique, 2000

By now it’s an accepted fact. In fluvial fiction, the French realist school found the conditions for its own style, that would culminate in L’Atalante.  Major French filmmakers in the Twenties have offered history many important works, all of which are marked by water, and whose sentimental and family dramas are carried along by an unstoppable current. On a background of landscapes that glide along like fake panoramas set in motion by invisible operators, Renoir, Epstein, Grémillon and Antoine gathered their actors on studio-barges which floated down real canals and rivers. […] In the end, L’Atalante would have neither equals nor successors. And yet, there is an image which recurs in all (or almost all…) these films: the sailor who walks the deck of his barge in the opposite direction of the vessel. An extraordinary gentle image of directions that negate one another, affectingly horizontal space, a sailor of pedestrian vanity, a bizarre illusion of walking on the surface of the waves, the lyricism of a bodily prow fighting the wind and water currents… Not Titanic, instead Les Amants du Pont-Neuf! Maurice Touzé in Epstein, Georges Terof in Renoir, Dullin in Grémillon, Alcover in Antoine, and Dasté in Vigo, measure their small decks with large steps, crossing many grandiose landscapes that lie beyond their immobile locomotion. Has the “cinegenic” art thus instead become photogenic?

Dominique Païni, in L’Atalante. Un film de Jean Vigo