Who wouldn't want to go back in time and say that to mean teacher?

Jean Vigo's Zero for Conduct is better known but lesser in stature than the more ambitious L'Atalante - still Z4C drew a lot of attention on college campuses in the 1960s and 70s for its exuberant portrayal of a student rebellion in a repressive French boarding school for boys. There's not all that much to the film: begins with boys returning to the school after probably the xmas vacation, and it looks as if they're prisoners heading back to jail, in their uniforms, traveling by train through the night, arriving in the dark hours. But we also see the rambunctious spirit of some of the boys - smoking up a storm in the non-smoking car, starting the rumor that another passenger has died. At the school, their inspired by a new teacher who's very free-spirited and lets them get away with a lot of riotous behavior. The headmaster, played by a very small man, a midget perhaps, with a very dark probably fake beard, is a bit of a martinet - but the kids clearly have the upper hand, tearing apart the dorm, a classroom, and ending - during the school's founder's day ceremonies - by locking themselves in the attic and prancing around - insanely dangerously - on the sloped, tiled roofs of the school buildings. The film ends with a nice fixed image of the boys on the roof raising their hands in celebration. Well, who wouldn't have wanted to do that in school? I 100-percent wish I could go back in time and say to some of the horrible, cruel teachers whom I endured in silence: You're full of shit. So this film speaks to something in all, or almost all, of us. Yet it's a technically screwy film - obviously a very early example of sound narrative, the narrative is choppy, the dialogue is spare - you can almost see that Vigo was thinking in terms of the sound cards of silent films rather than truly spoken dialogue - and none of the characters emerges with any depth. It's another early-cinema curiosity, definitely worth seeing - esp. in that it's only 45 minutes - to get a sense of where movies came from, how far we've come, and also of what we've lost: the free spirit and innocence of the early movies is now mired in complexity and production values.