When Jean Vigo wrote for "Zero de conduite", "Frapper la balle, n'importe ou, n'importe comment, n'importe quand", he was indicating, through a sporting maxim, the rhythm that should animate the scandalous scenery, the rapid movement of the game of the situations, the continuous attack against the obviousness of the image and every pathetic aspect.
The referral to Jean Vigo in the case of Ugo Nespolo is valid in two directions. All of Nespolo’s artistic work, films included, "frappe la balle", frenetically, from every angle and with every possible technique. The blow, and the attack is brought to immobility by old and "very new" views, it is brought to art as a place of prayer, to the esotericism of stereotyped gestures of a "comfortably seated" avant-garde that is no longer ironic and impulsive, and is capable only of complacent glances in generous mirrors. In this operation, Nespolo's strategy is to uncover the mechanisms of the game, propose a series of open moves towards possible counter-moves, and evaluate the discards between the two contests as fundamental components of a two party game. For Nespolo, the game is still images of the world, according to the known thesis of Fink, and an attempt as well to move the irreversibility of each esthetic operation into a field of livelier and precarious social stimuli.
The second possibility in the reference to Vigo regards more properly the cinema. Nespolo loves to treat the characters of his films with a paradoxical clarity that reaches the limits of caricature.
He plays on myths and emblems with an acute, violent irony. He loves to provoke embarrassing situations, contravene the obvious in every codified form. Also, a non-secondary stylistic feature of Nespolo is that he transfers intelligently and mimics a particular way of making movies by chance and simultaneous controls that was typical of the first avant-garde. It is impossible nowadays to distinguish in this first avant-garde what belongs to the cinema only, and what to the rapid evolution and expansion of the visual arts.