A brash link between 1920s Surrealist films and 1930s poetic realism, Jean Vigo's 44-minute Zéro de conduite (1933) became an influential paean to youthful freedom. Drawing on Vigo's years at boarding school after the murder of his anarchist father, his first fiction film celebrated a schoolboy revolt against their repressive instructors and midget principal. Alternately comic, serious, dreamlike, and grotesque, the film contrasts the imagination and energy of the boys -- with their games, plans, and a drawing that becomes animated -- to the Peeping Tom/candy-stealing teachers who mostly hand out the title's zeroes for conduct, except for one whimsically Chaplinesque teacher (Jean Dasté). Shot by Boris Kaufman, the now-famous pillow fight that precedes the rebellion becomes a slow-motion reverie of vivacious children and snow-like floating feathers; the sky literally seems to be the limit after the boys successfully disrupt the stiff Alumni Day celebration with a rooftop assault of empty cans. With its undeniably anti-authority message, Zéro de conduite was banned by French censors until after the Liberation in 1944. Celebrated for its anarchic spirit and stylistic boldness, the film especially inspired the French New Wave directors, and it was the direct antecedent of François Truffaut's The 400 Blows (1959) and Lindsay Anderson's If. . . (1968).