“London is unlikely to offer any other film as interesting as Jean Vigo’s Zéro de Conduite,” Greene wrote in 1936 when reviewing a theater’s series, The History of Film. At the time, the controversial film had been banned in France for three years, with its young firebrand director already dead, yet Zéro de conduite was already a vastly influential work or anarchic political critique.

Jean Vigo’s iconic film follows a group of French schoolboys pitted in precocious rebellion against the senseless and repressive bureaucracy of their boarding school. While the narrative takes seriously the heartaches of childhood and champions the anarchist convictions of its writer and director, it does so with a humor and hopefulness not unlike the lightness in the face of dark themes within Greene’s own work around boyhood. Greene returned to themes of childhood disillusionment several times in his work and remained interested in film about and for children, writing with particular enthusiasm for the Disney cartoon short also included in this program.