Jean Vigo (1905-1934) has been described as “the cinema's Rimbaud.” Uniting realism with surrealistic poetry, L'Atalante, photographed by Boris Kaufman (Dziga Vertov's brother and collaborator), evokes the atmosphere and characters of a rarely seen populist Paris. “We were intoxicated by the admirable landscapes of the Parisian canals,” Vigo has written. The plot involves a young barge captain and his peasant bride in their first days together on his barge, “L'Atalante.” Paris lures the restive young bride away from her jealous husband, but the two are reunited by an eccentric old salt, le Pere Jules, marvelously played by Michel Simon. In his use of actors, both professional and non-professional, Jean Vigo anticipated the methods of neorealism by almost fifteen years. He wanted to “surprise the characters by the camera...reveal the hidden reason for a gesture, to extract from an ordinary person his interior beauty.... Conscious acting cannot be tolerated.” (quoted in Sadoul's Dictionary of Filmmakers)