I have to say I am a bit surprised that this film is so famous, not only in France, but actually one of the more known short films everywhere around the world. A lot of it may have to do with writer and director Jean Vigo's untimely death at 29, one year after this was released. He only made 4 films in his career, 3 of them shorts and all of them are very well-received. I cannot talk about the other ones, although I will probably watch the two short documentaries at some point, but looking at this one here I was not particularly impressed. It's a 40-minute short movie and basically includes boys at a school constantly staging pranks for their teachers while occasionally also interacting with each other. It is black-and-white, which was still the way to go in 1933, by the way the year when Nazis came into power in Germany over 80 years ago, just to put it in perspective. So long before the likes of Pippi Longstocking, there were actually these French boys. But you don't really need to see it. Nothing memorable here. Only reason I can think of is that this may seem interesting to evaluate why it was banned for such a long time. But other than that, not recommended.
Review of Zero for Conduct
