Vigo’s 1934 film L’Atalante, a romantic fable about newlyweds, is always a high entry in film polls. Lindsay Anderson cited Zéro de Conduite (1933), Vigo’s celebration of anarchic schoolboy impulses, as the inspiration for his school satire If. The director Julien Temple (Absolute Beginners) turned his admiration into the biopic Vigo: A Passion for Life.

Vigo has also long been seen as a role model for the French New Wave directors: François Truffaut, who was captivated by L’Atalante aged 14 and had a school setting for his Les Quatre Cents Coups, saw Vigo as one of the first “cineastes by vocation”.

Vigo began his film career on the hoof, shooting the documentary short À Propos de Nice (1929) on a second-hand camera bought with money from his father-in-law. Vigo and his cameraman, Boris Kaufman, shot on the promenades and backstreets of the Côte d’Azur, picking out the idle rich in their furs and top hats and contrasting them with street kids at play, women scrubbing laundry and gutter cats basking in the sun.

To get their shots, they hid down sewers or concealed the camera under a blanket on Kaufman’s knees as Vigo pushed him along in a wheelchair. Such spirit foreshadows Dogme and today’s digital- video auteurs. As Vigo proudly declared in 1933: “The future belongs to independents.”

Polemicism was in his blood. Born to militant anarchists in a Parisian garret full of stray cats in 1905, Vigo later saw his father, an outspoken newspaper editor, imprisoned in 1917 for allegedly receiving payments from the German government. He was strangled to death by a prisoner using the shoelaces that the 12-year-old Jean had purchased for his father just before his arrest.

Vigo was gripped by his father’s fate; Michel Simon, who starred in L’Atalante, saw him as a Hamlet determined to avenge his father. More fatally, Vigo was gripped by ill-health. In 1929 he married a Polish woman, Elizabeth (Lydou) Lozinska, a fellow tuberculosis sufferer and wayward spirit. Temple’s Vigo: A Passion for Life sees Lydou as the glue of Vigo’s social circle. As one French critic has remarked: Lydou turned Vigo from an “anguished dilettante” into “a man intent on action”.

As a child, with his mother too unwell to look after him, Vigo attended a series of boarding schools. They formed the basis for Zero de Conduite, a poetic, nightmarish vision of school life. Fifty boys, who in the film smoke in the toilets, abuse a teacher, and have a pillow fight that turns into a revolt, were drawn from the neighbourhood in which Vigo was filming. In staging an orgy of riots and food fights, Vigo was less the ringmaster and more of an accomplice.

A spirit of farce is evident in À Propos de Nice and the little-seen short Taris (1931), in which the swimming champion Jean Taris is seen leaping backwards on to the poolside. And Vigo himself did not conform to the image of the doomed artist: anecdotes tell of egg fights and practical jokes, of Vigo and the actor Jean Dasté arriving at dinner disguised as pregnant women.

Zero de Conduite made Vigo’s reputation as an anarchist hero but it also meant that the film was swiftly banned; it wasn’t shown in France until after the war in 1945. So for his next film, his producer went for something less controversial — a script about a couple adjusting to married life on the Seine on a barge called L’Atalante.

The film presents a series of vignettes in which we see the barge skipper (Dasté) and his bride (Dita Parlo) fight and make love, almost visit Paris, separate and reconcile, on a boat that includes a raft of cats and a grizzled deck hand (Michel Simon). The film still dazzles with its wayward mix of naturalism and dreaminess.

“In filming prose, he effortlessly obtains poetry,” wrote Truffaut. But the studio did not see it that way. It recut L’Atalante drastically and renamed it Le Chaland Qui Passe (The Passing Barge) after a popular song that was then plastered all over the film. Only after the war was L’Atalante rediscovered and Vigo’s reputation with it. A restored print was released in 1990.

Vigo himself had been so ill while making L’Atalante, during an unusually cold winter, that sometimes he directed from a stretcher. He died a few weeks after the film’s release.

Today Vigo has become the maverick film-maker’s film-maker. Since 1951, a Prix Jean Vigo has been awarded in France to directors with “independence of spirit”.

Unlike him, however, not all of them have left their mark on film history.

• The Jean Vigo season starts tomorrow at the Renoir cinema, Brunswick Sq, WC1 (020-7837 8402). The Complete Jean Vigo is also on DVD (Artificial Eye)

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