 |
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
 |
|
| Le Silence de la mer | |||
"Melville’s extraordinary first feature … is in effect a triangular drama in which two people don’t speak. A German officer (Vernon), convalescing from a wound, is billeted on an elderly Frenchman (Robain) and his niece (Stéphane). Respecting their obstinate refusal to address the hated invader, he meets their silence with a series of monologues, apparently ignored, in which he recalls his life before the war and all the things he values; but what he reveals about himself causes the girl to fall in love, without being able to declare her feelings. Filmed… using a new cinematic language of transient expressions and glances, the film was a root influence on Bresson and the whole French New Wave." – Time Out Film Guide "Le silence de la mer is devastatingly beautiful. The composition, cinematography and use of sound all work together to create the impression of an intensely silent house filled by the sound of one man’s love for the culture he is helping to destroy. While Melville would later become known for the moody minimalism of his gangster films, this film’s eerie use of light and texture is intensely stylised in a manner that is reminiscent of Jean Cocteau’s La belle et la bête (1948). In fact, Cocteau and Melville would collaborate quite extensively on Melville’s second film Les enfants terribles (1950). Aside from its technical brilliance, Le silence de la mer also offers a fascinating snapshot of a French intellectual class that was still trying to come to terms with the implications of widespread collaboration. Indeed, between the officer’s status as a “Good German” and his lengthy speeches on the greatness of French culture, it is easy to read this film as an ode to the majesty of France (the film is based on a novel written by a member of the Resistance) but look beyond the foreground and you find a morally ambiguous world full of silently complicit French people, bars closed to Jews and a Nazi delivering what was effectively the Petainist line that France would become greater through collaboration. While Le silence de la mer may lack the slow-burning outrage of … L’armée des ombres (1969) this is still a heroically ambiguous film from a time when France was desperate to escape all suggestion of moral ambiguity." – FilmJuice "The pattern of interactions between the old man, his niece, and the German is not simply a facile metaphor for the capital-r Resistance or for the war itself, but is instead an exploration of how war complicates emotional relationships between those who might otherwise be very close. Mining the same thematic vein is Jean Renoir’s La grande illusion, in which men of the same class can have more in common, despite their being political enemies, than men of the same country and same fighting forces…. It develops themes to which Melville would return again and again: the power and expressiveness of silence, the personal toll of the Resistance, and the difficulty of engaging another on a basic human level when professional or political constraints dictate an adversarial relationship." – Matt Bailey, Not Coming to a Theater Near You |
|
||
| France 1949 | |||
Director: Jean-Pierre Melville With: Howard Vernon (Werner von Ebrennac), Nicole Stephane (the neice), Jean-Marie Robain (the uncle), Ami Aaroe (Werner’s fiancee), Georges Patrix (assistant), Denis Sadier (friend), Rudelle, Fromm, Vernier, Hermann, Schmiedel (Germans) 89 mins, 35mm (1,37:1), black and white In French, with English subtitles G cert Canterbury Film Society |
|||
