Vigo used a subject imposed by his producer to turn L'Atalante into a poetic masterpiece on the theme of passionate love. He died soon after making his first full length feature, but not before seeing it mutilated by the producer. The restored L'Atalante which we present tonight reveals Vigo's very deliberate use of registers which were deemed questionable by his contemporaries; it also restores those bizarre juxtapositions that were most dear to the director, and most infuriating to the censors. In telling of a young barge captain and his peasant bride in their first days together on his barge, L'Atalante is realism united with surrealistic poetry, leading to a powerful lyricism. Shot against a backdrop of the Parisian canals, with which "we were intoxicated," as Vigo wrote, the film anticipates the methods of neorealism by almost fifteen years, particularly in Vigo's use of actors, professionals and non-professionals alike, "to reveal the hidden reason from a gesture, to extract from an ordinary person his interior beauty--or a caricature of him..."