It is difficult to find even lovers of film who are familiar with the gentle magic of the late French director Jean Vigo. Most have never heard his name, not that they can be blamed: Vigo was born in 1905 and died in 1934 from tuberculosis at 29. His career lasted only four years, his films were not considered anything special, and it would be another decade before his magic was to be seen, felt, and studied, first in France and then elsewhere.

For the next two weeks, Vigo’s two best works will be restored on the projectors of Anthology Film Archives, which will host a rare screening of his 44-minute extended 1933 short “Zero for Conduct,” as well as two screenings of the director’s feature-length masterpiece of 1934, “L’Atalante.”

“Zero for Conduct” may take place in a boarding school, but it was so clearly a parable about authoritarian rule and the fiery resolve of popular revolt that French censors deemed the work “anti-French,” and swiftly pulled it from screens.

The director’s father, a militant anarchist, was killed when Vigo was only 12, and one can sense a long-festering rebellious impulse pulsating beneath the surface of “Zero for Conduct.” The schoolchildren are playful and a bit naughty, but Vigo also makes it clear that many of their high jinks serve as acts of defiance against a corrupt system. Vigo depicts the teachers as tyrants, and enlisted a dwarf to play the headmaster.

As the children begin to band together and organize, Vigo choreographs a battle for supremacy that involves much more than a fictional school. When a pillow fight erupts, it isn’t the youthful enthusiasm or even the rule-breaking we’re meant to notice — it’s the glorious mess the classmates are making. The indelible flurry of feathers segues into a protest march, as the children take to the top of the school, marching in formation. In one of the most striking images of fellowship and rebellion, Vigo tilts the camera to show the students triumphantly reaching the summit of the school. For this one shining moment, there’s no mistaking who’s in charge.

If Vigo was able to turn a boarding school into a rebel outpost, then one shouldn’t be surprised that he turned a filthy French river barge into a haven for romance in “L’Atalante.”

Reportedly so sick during the making of the film that he was forced to film some sequences from a stretcher (not to mention scribbling editing notes so that the film could be completed after his death), Vigo suffused his masterpiece with a dreamlike, translucent quality that suggests an artist obsessed with capturing the beauty of everyday life, even as it is slipping through his fingers.

Much like “Zero for Conduct,” the story in “L’Atalante” is merely a cipher for a far more sophisticated and nuanced visual discussion. The three central characters are a man, his best friend, and his new wife. In a long, near-silent sequence, the film opens with the image of two newlyweds trekking from the church to the barge, the groom clearly obsessed with lifting anchor and getting back to work. As the trio trolls down the river, the romance evolves into tediousness, the buzz of early infatuation becoming mired in the monotony of daily life.

There is some bickering, and some subtle beauty in the fine details of how they interact. Slowly, they learn to take and give, to cohabit. But when a misunderstanding erupts, it drives a wedge between a stubborn woman and a confused man, leaving a void that reignites their sense of yearning.

To describe the plot is an empty pursuit, as is describing the metaphors. The lonely man hugs a chunk of ice on the boat in the hope of feeling anything other than despair.

Even when horrified by the conditions of the barge, or the boorish behavior of her husband’s best friend, the woman tries, in ways both big and small, to make the best of it. Early on, wife tells husband that she used to put her head underwater and open her eyes, and she would see the face of her true love — his face. Later in the film, lonely and estranged from the woman he’s come both to love and loathe, the man repeats the act. Into the icy river he plunges his face in a fit of desperation, frustration, hope, longing, and futility. It is an act of psychological suicide rendered sublime, as a face floats up toward our young hero from the dark waters of the deep.

A dying director, born in the wrong decade, in a less-than-ideal story of profoundly flawed love, gives us a moment of beauty for the ages. It is among the most rapturous sequences ever imagined, in one of the finest films ever made. If you’ve never heard the name Jean Vigo, now’s the time.

ssnyder@nysun.com