Film Review
It was during a visit to England in 1943 that Jean-Pierre Melville, an
active member in the French resistance, came across an English
translation of the novella
Le
Silence de la mer by the renowned French resistance writer
Vercors and committed himself to adapting it into a full-length
film. The odds against Melville fulfilling this ambition were
enormous.
He had had no previous experience of making a film, had
no contacts in the French film industry, and was turned down
point-blank when he offered to buy the rights from Vercors, who felt
that any adaptation would compromise the book's integrity. Yet
Melville doggedly persevered, overcame all of the obstacles that came his
way, and ultimately delivered a cinematic landmark. Not only was
his
Silence de la mer the
most important film about the French resistance but, in cinematic
terms, it marked a dramatic break with the past. Melville's new
approach to filmmaking would reshape the landscape of French
cinema for over a decade and provided the impetus for the French
New Wave. In the course of his career, Melville would make many
great films, but none would have greater signficance than his first
feature,
Le Silence de la mer.
The biggest challenge that confronted Melville was to persuade Vercors
to give his permission for the film to be made. The writer
grudgingly acquiesced when Melville said he would show the film to a
jury of former resistance members and would destroy the negative if any
of them felt it was unfaithful to the spirit of the novel.
Melville even persuaded Vercors to allow most of the film to be
recorded in his own house, the house in which the book had been
written, believing that this would lend greater authenticity to the
film. As it turned out, this latter arrangement was far from
satisfactory from Melville's point of view and it did nothing to soften
Vercors' antipathy for the venture. Even when the occupation was
over, Vercors' novella still retained something of the character of a
sacred text for many French people. Within months of its first
clandestine publication in February 1942 it was greatly esteemed by
those who were involved with the French resistance - just to read it
was considered an act of defiance against the Nazis. Melville's
own firsthand experiences in the resistance and a fierce sense of
independence made him the best person to bring Vercors' potent
anti-Nazi statement to the screen. This was confirmed when only
one of the twenty-four resistance veterans who previewed the film
disapproved of it (and that one dissenting vote was disqualified by
Vercors himself).
Immediately on its release, Melville's
Le Silence de la mer was hailed as
a masterpiece by many film critics of the time, included the leading
critic André Bazin who offered fulsome praise for the film's
literary quality, which captured not just the substance of Vercors'
novel, but also its soul. The film was also a surprising
commercial success, attracting an audience of 1.3 million - an
impressive figure for a film that was made on a budget of 120 thousand
francs, one tenth of what a conventional studio film cost. The
eminent writer Jean Cocteau was so impressed with what he saw that he
at once invited Melville to direct his next film,
Les Enfants terribles.
The film did however attract considerable hostility from some quarters,
notably the unions who resented Melville's flouting of union rules; at
each showing of the film, the projector had to be guarded to prevent
the reels from being seized and destroyed by incensed union members.
The success of
Le Silence de la mer
can be put down to two things - Melville's radically new approach to
cinema, which boldly shattered many of the conventions that had limited
the scope for innovation in French cinema for much of the past two
decades, and the fact that it caught the public Zeitgeist perfectly and
played a significant part in France's post-Liberation catharsis.
When he set out to make the film, Melville had no intention of aligning
himself with the French film industry, which, at the time, was highly
regulated, very cliquey and heavily controlled by powerful
unions. In an edition of
L'Écran
français (a forerunner to
Les Cahiers du cinéma) which
promoted
Le Silence de la mer
(No. 201, 3/5/1949), Melville offered an impassioned plea for a new
kind of cinema: "Do we always have to adhere to the same rules
that have been followed a thousand times and which, for good or bad,
only deliver five good films? Can we not try something
different? Should we not, enriched by the lessons we have
learned, try to renovate an art form?" By deliberately choosing
to opt out of the system by which films were made in France, Melville
set himself up as the model independent filmmaker, and it is
undoubtedly the artistic freedom that this gave him which made him one
of the most influential and innovative French filmmakers of his time.
Equally important for the film's impact was that it was perfectly
judged to capture the public mood of its time. After the
Liberation, the French nation sought to rid itself of the shame of
occupation, and one way to achieve this was to hype up the role that
the resistance played during the war. Films such as
Le Silence de la mer and
René Clément's
La Bataille du rail (1946) and
Le Père tranquille
(1946) added substance to the myth that during the war France had been
a nation of resistance fighters who were constantly striving to
overcome the Nazi occupation. It was not until the late 1960s
that the true picture emerged, partly through films such as Marcel
Ophüls'
Le Chagrin et la pitié
(1969), and it became evident that only a very small proportion of the
French population had supported the resistance. Perhaps the real
value of
Le Silence de la mer
was that it helped France to regain her dignity at a time when the
humiliation and the shame of occupation hung over the country like a
dark cloud of incessant mourning, perpetuating a lie, but a very
necessary lie.
The film's depiction of resistance is subtle, even ambiguous, and this
has created some speculation as to whether Melville was being subtly ironic in
his treatment of Vercors' novel. The way in which the two main
French characters - an old man and his niece - choose to defy the
occupation (represented by the German officer who is billeted with
them) is merely to keep their silence. On the face of it, this
hardly appears to be resistance at all - just two characters blithely
ignoring the presence of the Germans and carrying on as though nothing
had changed. But, as we become conscious of the effect that the
German officer, von Ebrennac, is having on these two
characters, we realise that theirs is indeed a determined act of
defiance, since they must repress their own feelings and behave in a
manner that is contrary to their true nature. The question you
could then ask is: how is this different from the behaviour of the
majority of French people who did not participate in the resistance but
merely got on with their lives without taking a position for or against
the occupation? What indeed do we mean by resistance - must
it inevitably involve armed struggle, or is it simply to hold out,
like a plant courageously resisting the cold frosts of winter?
Just as the film's two
résistants
do not live up our stereotypical notion of the French resistance,
neither does its main German character fit the familiar caricature of
the fanatical guntoting Nazi. Far from being the archetypal
Nazi brute, von Ebrennac is a cultured man who shows nothing but
courtesy to his hosts. He sincerely believes his fanciful idea
about a Franco-German Utopia in which the peoples of both country will
live together in harmony, each benefiting from the other's cultural
heritage. It is only when he goes off to Paris and consorts with
his fellow officers (who
are fanatical
guntoting brutes) that von Ebrennac realises the extent of his
delusion. The
Beauty and the
Beast allegory which he had previously used to characterise the
present relationship between France and Germany proves to be
apt indeed, except that now the Teutonic Beast is revealed to be a savage
barbarian who has no hope of being transformed into a noble
prince. The silence of the old man and his niece fulfils
its purpose - they retain their honour and their enemy is made to
realise that what he represents is darkness, not light.
It is the unrelenting tension between the three main protagonists which
so powerfully evokes the spirit of resistance that is felt in Vercors'
book. Melville sustains the tension through his minimalist yet
highly stylised mise-en-scène, which allows us to penetrate the
psyche of the German officer and his two unwilling hosts.
Melville's technique here is far more modest and restrained than in any
of his subsequent films and is more characteristic of his contemporary
Robert Bresson. Of particular note is Melville's use of
sound. The harsh silence of the old man and his niece is
accentuated by the relentless ticking of a clock. The old man
betrays his feelings to us through effective use of the internal
monologue, whilst his niece remains unnaturally silent, as though she
were a ghost. It is interesting that in all of Melville's
subsequent films, his female characters are almost invariably
inexpressive and doll-like, as if to suggest they have no real part to
play in his male-dominated dreamscapes other than to precipitate the
hero's downfall, like the archetypal
femme
fatale of classic film noir. The silence of the
women is one of the defining characteristics of Melville's films, and
it is extremely unsettling.
What contributes most to the film's oppressive aura is its unusual
interior lighting and camera positioning, which owe much to German
expressionism. Melville and his first-time cinematographer Henri
Decaë broke practically all of the rules of the game -
deliberately over-lighting or under-lighting scenes for dramatic effect
and using camera angles which would have been deemed ludicrously
eccentric by most professional filmmakers of the time. When the German
officer is first introduced to us, he is
seen in an extreme close-up from a very low camera angle, as though to
emphasise his authority. As he fails to break through his hosts'
wall of silence, von Ebrennac's authority seems to ebb away and he is
soon reduced to an ordinary man whose only weapons are words, words
that hurt his opponents in ways that he cannot realise but which fail
to win him the victory he seeks. The stark lighting emphasises
repeatedly the unbridgeable gulf that exists between the German officer
and his hosts. By contrast, the exterior sequences are shot
in a far more naturalistic manner, almost as a documentary. These
two starkly contrasting cinematic styles suggest two worlds, the
external world, which the Nazis have so visibly conquered, and the
internal world of the defiant human soul, which the Nazis will never
claim victory over.
Le Silence de la mer represented an
iconoclastic assault on the prevailing situation in the French film
industry and would have a far-reaching impact, inspiring a whole
generation of new independent filmmakers to follow Melville's
example. The seeds of the French New Wave were sown here, and the
harvest would be bountiful indeed. Nouvelle vague directors such
as François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard would venerate
Jean-Pierre Melville as a shining example of the film auteur and would
take their inspiration from his early films. Melville himself
would have a further impact on French cinema through his stylish
American-flavoured gangster films -
Le Doulos (1962),
Le
Samouraï (1967) and
Le
Cercle rouge (1970), revisiting the dark and treacherous world of
the French resistance in his 1969 masterpiece,
L'Armée des ombres (1969).
Whoever first coined the phrase
silence is golden may well have
had Jean-Pierre Melville's first film in mind - a captivating little masterwork that
could hardly fail to unleash a tsunami on French cinema.
© James Travers 2011
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Next Jean-Pierre Melville film:
Les Enfants terribles (1950)