The Essentials: The 10 Greatest Jean-Pierre Melville Films

Melville EssentialsWhen sifting through the catalogue of illustrious French filmmakers, the pioneers and precursors to the French New Wave, those creators of a new cinematic language, immediately pop out. You know the ones; Jean Renoir, Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, Robert Bresson, et al. Put them in a single room and somewhere in a shadowy corner, wearing a rain-slicked trench-coat, his eyes obscured by the brim of his fedora, sits Jean-Pierre Melville. Unlike many of the others, he didn’t go out of his way to bend the rules of cinematic convention — he did it casually, like one of his gangsters. Born Jean-Pierre Grumbach and adopting the moniker “Melville” after his favorite American author, he fought as part of the French Resistance during WWII, and started making independent films in the late ’40s after he was denied an assistant director’s license. His experience during the war, coupled with a high admiration for Hollywood gangster pictures of the ’30s and ’40s, fused together a filmmaking style that thrived most vividly in the crime genre. The same genre that would be redefined by films like “Le Samourai,” “The Army of Shadows,” and “Le Cercle Rouge” — the cornerstones of his lasting legacy.

So while he may not be the first name that comes to mind when one thinks of the French New Wave, it was he who introduced Godard to the idea of jump-cuts, for example. In fact, Melville became something of a godfather to the movement, and as a result was homaged in one of the most famous director cameos in cinema history; the philosophizing Parvulesco in “Breathless.” But Melville distanced himself from the politics of cinematic and ideological movements, and transformed French cinema in his own, individualistic, way. Honing his skill for dialogue so hard-boiled it could cracks skulls, for palpably gritty atmospherics, location set-pieces that ingrain themselves into the mind, and a soulful approach to the tragic arc of the doomed anti-hero, Jean-Pierre Melville mastered an evergreen cinematic tradition that influenced countless filmmakers, and continues to today.

To mark this week’s re-release of “The Army of Shadows,” which plays for a week at Film Forum in New York from this Wednesday, we dedicate our essentials series to this master of mood and criminal netherworlds. So dim the lights, pour yourself an inappropriate amount of whiskey and explore these 10 must-see Melville films.

Melville, Le Silence De La Mer“La Silence de la Mer” (1949)
This debut feature is a distant relative to the atmospheric crime films that would ultimately carve his name among the greats, yet even so, “La Silence de la Mer” is vital in any conversation about Melville. It’s a film that relies so heavily on narration, and is so spatially limited (taking place mostly in a single living room), that it should revokes its right to be cinematic but ends up being so regardless. This beautiful disregard for convention and tendency to go against the grain would go on to become part of Melville’s signature. Moreover, the film is a key introduction to the director as cynical humanist; it’s a story about a humble uncle (Jean-Marie Robain) and niece (Nicole Stéphane), who are forced to house German lieutenant Werner von Ebrennac (a towering Howard Vernon) in 1941, choosing silence as their weapon of defiance. This leaves room for the cordial and romantic Ebrennac to soliloquize on his love of French culture with charisma and intellectual grace, revealing himself as something of an anti-Nazi, and patriot with delusions of sympathetic grandeur. With incisive black-and-white cinematography from Henri Dacaë, angles that grow more immense with every cut, a grandfather clock that chips at the tension with every tick, and a softly pulverizing climax that contains all of its power under the surface, “La Silence de la Mer” was a bold introduction to a new, invigorating cinematic voice. A silent bond is formed, not only between the three principle characters, but between director and audience; a trust that, no matter how minimal the narrative or sparse the setting, cinema can within even the narrowest confines.