'The lone assassin protagonist of Melville’s most celebrated film, Le Samouraï (1967), both enacts his crimes and observes the patterned compositions he creates through his meticulous movements and steely actions. There is another moment in Bob le flambeur where Bob looks, as many of Melville’s characters do, at his unshaven face in the mirror. Though this provokes a momentary shock of existential awareness – the notation of age and a concomitant world-weariness – it is also a moment of pure contemplation; the character simultaneously sees both from within and outside himself. Typical of Melville’s aesthetic style (and his ethical perspective), we are shown these moments and events through a mixture of seeming point-of-view shots and a vast array of detached perspectives (which rarely repeat camera set-ups). Thus, while the characters are both ‘interior’ and ‘exterior’ to the situation, we are also both inside and outside their view of it, engaged in the film’s action while also observing it. It is this combination of direct engagement and distanced contemplation, of feeling character and observing actor, as well as the joining of real-time observation – which Colin McArthur describes as a “cinema of process” – and aesthetic abstraction (heightened or drained colours, self-consciously staged compositions) that defines Melville’s cinema.
'The precise detail of action and composition is important to both Melville’s rendition of popular genres (most often the gangster film) and to the peculiar way in which he treats time and space. As a result, the atmosphere, locales, places and actions of Melville’s films can seem both actual and totally imagined. For example, the lovingly sketched Montmartre of Bob le flambeur is both a realistic geographic environment and a cartoon of the milieu of two-bit criminal Paris. His films often create a dream-like, almost clandestine sense of geography, place and period which sits alongside equally evocative but austere observations of the realistic minutiae of a particular historical moment or generic situation: the conditions of occupation in war-time France (Léon Morin, Prêtre, 1961); the slate-coloured, damp feeling world and meticulously repeated actions of a lone wolf assassin (Le Samouraï); the meticulous build-up and execution of a daring jewel robbery (Le Cercle rouge, 1970). It is often this sense of a particular place, space or physical sensation that stays with you after experiencing a Melville film. For example, when reviewing Les Enfants terribles (1950) François Truffaut felt that the places and situations created by Melville were as much sensorial as physical: “one of the few olfactory films in the history of cinema (its odor is of children’s sickrooms).” Even such lesser films as Deux Hommes dans Manhattan (1959) and Un Flic (1972) build a concrete but moodily sparse world from a collection of sounds, shades and colours observed from multiple perspectives and angles.
'Melville himself has been careful to place his work within the context of a composed or synthetic tradition of filmmaking: “I am careful never to be realistic.… What I do is false. Always.” But this statement encapsulates only ‘half’ the story, as John Flaus suggests: “He [Melville] does not seek to simulate the world but to create anew from the materials of the world. The severe form, the precise detail, the delicate effect are part of a style which shows rather than refers to its subject.” Essentially, Melville’s cinema is a highly complex and regulated thing within which nothing, not an edit, a gesture, a sound or a camera movement, is wasted (though it is also a cinema that is often also stylistically adventurous). His films present a collection of minute observations and actions played out in what seems to be real time, while also reveling in self-conscious displays of what could pass for pure style. Melville combines this with an overwhelming sense of lived experience. His films are often, all at once, highly personal, non-naturalistic (full of attenuated shades and colours or self-consciously fake back projections), dream-like fictions, and documentary-like narratives. His style often also revolves around the meticulous placement and withdrawal of certain cinematic techniques. For example, despite the head of the character of the niece being consistently framed in Le Silence de la mer (1949), she is never given a close-up until the penultimate point of the film.
'Jean-Pierre Melville made a total of 13 features during his 25 year career. Though never exactly in or out of critical fashion, Melville’s gangster films can be seen as a major influence on many of the crime films from the 1960s onwards, while Le Silence de la mer, Les Enfants terribles, and Bob le flambeur can be regarded as fairly direct antecedents to the nouvelle vague. Nevertheless, Melville was always a reticent, fringe-dwelling and independent figure within French cinema who routinely rejected claims of his complicity in or membership of any such movement: “If… I have consented to pass for their [the nouvelle vague's] adopted father for a while, I do not wish to anymore, and I have put some distance between us.” It is probably more accurate to suggest that he belongs to no particular time or any one cinematic tradition – though the ‘sensibility’ of his work can be traced through the formative influences of existentialism, surrealism, classical American cinema, French poetic realism, Herman Melville, his war-time experience as a Resistance fighter in France, amongst other things. For all his Americanophile affectations, extraordinary knowledge of 1930s Hollywood minutiae (including his own Bazinian pantheon), and much-cited fascination with the gangster genre he should still be regarded as a quintessentially French filmmaker. Thus, at heart, Melville’s career and films are movingly paradoxical; romantic in effect and example his films and broader career are defined by a pragmatic, austere and rigorous approach.' -- Adrian Danks
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Stills
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Further
Jean-Pierre Melville @ IMDb
The films of Jean-Pierre Melville @ The Hauntological Society
Jean-Pierre Melville @ The Criterion Collection
John-Pierre Melville @ mubi
'Army of Shadows and the Unforgiving Code of Jean-Pierre Melville'
'In Praise of Jean-Pierre Melville'
'Jean-Pierre Melville—a minor but intriguing figure'
'Jean-Pierre Melville: Notes on the French Auteur's Career'
'Jean-Pierre Melville - Film Noir 2.0'
'No. 1 With a Bullet'
'Perfectly Executed'
Book: 'Melville On Melville' by Jean-Pierre Melville
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Extras
Jean-Pierre Melville - interview (1970)
Alain Delon, Jean-Pierre Melville, a.o. on 'Le Samourai'
Jean-Pierre Melville's cameo in 'Breathless'
Cinéma Cinémas - Jean Pierre Melville - 1989
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Interview
(in French)
On vous a souvent présenté comme le parrain de la Nouvelle Vague. Flatté?
Jean-Pierre Melville: Je ne me suis jamais senti de la Nouvelle Vague, j'étais déjà un vieux monsieur quand elle a vu le jour, en 1959. Mais j'avais une immense sympathie pour ces jeunes garçons. J'ai fait un bout de chemin avec eux en acceptant d'être le grand frère, qui pouvait, à l'extrême rigueur, leur donner des conseils. Qu'ils ne suivaient pas, car les conseils ne sont pas faits pour être suivis.
Après avoir tourné Bob le flambeur dans les rues de Montmartre, en 1955, vous faites l'acquisition des studios Jenner, dans le 13e... Pourquoi posséder vos propres studios?
J-PM: Pour faire comme Pagnol et Chaplin. Il faut être fou pour avoir ses propres studios. C'était un cauchemar et, en même temps, merveilleux parce que j'habitais au-dessus et qu'à 3 heures du matin, je descendais sur le plateau pour caler les lumières pour le lendemain. Mes studios sont partis en fumée en juin 1967.
Vous ne seriez pas ce qu'on appelle un "control freak"?
J-PM: N'être que metteur en scène ne me suffisait pas. J'avais envie de tout faire. J'aurais adoré tourner un film dont j'aurais été... l'auteur des décors, de la musique, de la photo. Parmi tous les metteurs en scène français, j'étais le plus technicien. J'étais sans doute le seul à savoir me servir d'une caméra, mis à part, bien entendu, les chefs opérateurs devenus metteurs en scène.
Quelle étape de la réalisation d'un film préférez-vous?
JP-M: L'écriture et le montage, l'inspiration et la finition. Par contre, le tournage est une chose abominable. J'appelais ça la formalité fastidieuse. Le seul répit que je pouvais trouver dans cette pénible affaire, c'est d'avoir, à un moment, la chance de diriger les comédiens.
Et cette fascination pour les gangsters...
J-PM: Les gangsters sont des pauvres types, des minables. J'en ai connu pas mal. Ils ne sont pas du tout comme ceux de mes films. Pour moi, le film de gangsters était un fourre-tout, un canevas facile pour me permettre de raconter des histoires qui me tenaient à cœur sur la liberté individuelle, l'amitié, les rapports entre les hommes, la trahison.
A la question « Que désirez-vous ? », l'écrivain que vous jouiez dans A bout de souffle répondait: "Devenir immortel et mourir." On dirait que la mort ne vous a jamais fait peur...
JP-M: Elle m'indiffère complètement. Je la connais très bien. De mon vivant, je partais du principe que la mort, c'était pour tout de suite, dans une minute, dans deux heures, dans six mois. Et que ça n'avait vraiment aucune espèce d'importance.
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10 of Jean-Pierre Melville's 13 films
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Les Enfants Terrible (1950)
'Writer Jean Cocteau and director Jean-Pierre Melville joined forces for this elegant adaptation of Cocteau’s immensely popular, wicked novel about the wholly unholy relationship between a brother and sister. Elisabeth (a remarkable Nicole Stéphane) and Paul (Edouard Dermithe) close themselves off from the world by playing an increasingly intense series of mind games with the people who dare enter their lair—until romance and jealousy intrude. Melville’s operatic camera movements and Cocteau’s perverse, poetic approach to character merge in Les enfants terribles to create one of French cinema’s greatest, and most surprising, meetings of the minds.'-- The Criterion Collection
Chapter 1 "Condorcet"
Chapter 5 "Theatre"
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Bob le Flambeur(1956)
'The movie, while impeccably hard-boiled, is a valentine to a romantic Paris now two or three times removed from our own purview. It all takes place at night, and mostly in Montmartre and Pigalle. The former—the age-old bohemian district on the heights at the top of the city—can be seen to its best advantage framed by the huge window of Bob’s studio apartment. The latter, the hub of strip-tease and whoredom and back rooms and dark alleys, appears here as gallant and swashbuckling a neighborhood as it once perhaps was. The context allows Melville to retail a story that might derive from the troubadour songs of the Middle Ages—a last joust by an aging knight. Even if you allow for the Frenchness of the enterprise, what you have here is an underworld bearing about the same relation to historical reality as the settings of most Westerns—a place that came into fully-imagined being only in retrospective view. And as with the top rank of Westerns, you’d be a fool to quibble.'-- Luc Sante
Trailer
Excerpt
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Léon Morin, Priest(1961)
'If Léon Morin itself does not seem so far from the New Wave, Melville’s statements about it at the time do—for instance, “I made it for the producer and the mass audience. I’ve had enough of being an auteur maudit, a maverick who can’t be trusted.” Melville’s mainstreaming of his film practice put him in bad odor with the avant-garde for many years, but it won him the popularity he wanted, and his films were eventually embraced by those earlier critics as well. Léon Morin, Priest is not the big, variegated canvas of the Resistance that Melville first imagined; that came later, in 1969, with Army of Shadows. It is an exquisitely circumscribed and powerful picture of how people cope in a world devoid of certainty.'-- Gary Indiana
Trailer
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Le Doulos(1962)
'This 1962 film, Melville’s seventh feature, was his first true foray into the post–film noir, so-called Série noire crime genre in which he would subsequently forge some of his most celebrated works: Le samouraï, Le cercle rouge, and Le deuxième souffle. Yes, Melville’s 1956 Bob le flambeur told the tale (eventually!) of a casino heist, and his 1959 Deux hommes dans Manhattan has its eponymous two men undertake a missing-persons case. But both films are discursive, rambling affairs, often concentrating on the charms of their respective settings (the fairy-tale sleaze of Bob’s Montmartre/Pigalle, the Broadway bright lights of Deux hommes), and ending things reasonably well for their heroes (Bob le flambeur, in particular, is one of the greatest shaggy-dog stories ever put on film). In Le doulos, Melville makes his genre move with a vengeance; for all its atmospheric touches, it has a relentless forward movement unprecedented in any of his prior films.' -- Glenn Kenny
Trailer
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Magnet of Doom (1963)
'Even though there's a crime element to it, Magnet of Doom is mostly a road movie with existentialist underpinnings. Even if the film isn't completely successful, its thematically fascinating journey. In fact, its second only to "Le Samourai" as Melville's most interesting film. Its also rather similar to that later film, despite a seemingly completely different storyline. Off the bat, I noticed similarities between the minimalist style, the color schemes, and the stark undercurrent of helplessness throughout. The ending in particular is memorably nihilistic. The direction by Melville is much more slowly paced than his more well known films, but that suits the meditative nature of the film perfectly. The acting by both Jean-Paul Belmondo and Charles Vanel is good as usual for both of them. It's a shame this is as overlooked as it is (only one other IMDb review as I write this), because its a really interesting film. With the recent revival of Army of Shadows, maybe there's hope for this.' -- Timothy Farrell
Excerpt
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Le deuxième souffle(1966)
'Le deuxième souffle, Jean-Pierre Melville’s ninth and to that point most commercially successful feature in France, was an important watershed in the director’s career. It points back to the somewhat abstract, elemental, and iconographically precise hypermasculine gangster milieu of Bob le flambeur (1956) and Le doulos (1962) and forward to the more expansive, rarefied, and philosophically circumspect works—such as Le samouraï (1967) and Le cercle rouge (1970)—that followed. It was also Melville’s last film to be shot in black and white, pushing the tonal qualities and gray scale of the image to new levels. Despite its troubled production history—it was shot in two stages in Melville’s studio and various Marseille and Paris locations—it is a masterful work that ultimately brought to a close what Melville himself described as a period of several years “in the wilderness.” Still, despite the importance of Le deuxième souffle to understanding Melville’s career, it has remained one of his most underrated, and least examined, films.'-- Adrian Danks
Trailer
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Le Samouraï(1967)
'Tone and style are everything with Le samouraï. Poised on the brink of absurdity, or a kind of attitudinizing male arrogance, Jean-Pierre Melville’s great film flirts with that macho extremism and slips over into dream and poetry just as we grow most alarmed. So the implacably grave coolness of Alain Delon’s Jef Costello is audaciously mannered, as he puts on white gloves for a killing and announces that for him “principle” is merely “habit.” (The film deserves one moment, one shot, of him alone in his room, when the impassive noirist suddenly collapses in unexplained laughter.) Whereas, as we see him stretched out on his bed, the source of a silent spiral of cigarette smoke, like a patient, tidy corpse-in-waiting, he is not just Delon, or some against-type Costello minus Abbott. He is the distilled essence of cinema’s solitary guns for hire, suspended between the somnambulant calm of Lee Marvin in Point Blank and the self-destructive dedication that guides Robert Bresson’s priest in Diary of a Country Priest.'-- David Thomson
Trailer
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Army of Shadows(1969)
'Army of Shadows was the third and final film in which Melville dealt directly with the German occupation of France—Le silence de la mer (1949), his first feature, and Léon Morin, prêtre (1961) were also set during that time—and his only film devoted to the Resistance. But it was made in the middle of his stunning late run of gangster films, preceded by Le deuxième souffle (1966) and Le samouraï (1967) and followed by Le cercle rouge (1970) and Un flic (1972), and it has more in common with them, formally, narratively, and philosophically, than with the earlier war films. Even if you do not conclude, as so many now do, that Army of Shadows is Melville’s most significant film—his signature work—and certainly one of the greatest films of the sixties, it will at least change the ways in which you make meaning of his surrounding work.'-- Amy Taubin
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Le Cercle rouge (1970)
'Le cercle rouge carries a Buddhist epigraph basically stating that people who are meant to meet will do so “in the red circle,” no matter what crazy routes they take to it. To illustrate his own aphorism (we are told), Buddha took a piece of red chalk and drew a circle. In the movie proper, Corey is the only one we see wielding red chalk and tracing a circle—on the tip of his cue in a billiard hall. The men in this film make their own fates. True, the red circle refers to their common, bloody destiny. But it also conjures a bullet through the heart. If bourgeois viewers of Le cercle rouge find themselves alarmingly sympathetic to these bandits, it’s because they navigate ethically compromised waters that register as a true, if bleak, projection of a polluted social mainstream. Amoral is a term often used to describe the Melvillean universe. Le cercle rouge, however, proves rigorously moral in its dramatic evaluation of five men and their responses to a heist and its aftermath.'-- Michael Sragow
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Un flic(1972)
'Plenty hold that master French crime filmmaker Jean-Pierre Melville had reached his pinnacle long before this, his last film, and he definitely did. But Un Flic plays exquisitely with all his signature muteness, austere faces and bleak colors. Cinematographer Walter Wottitz eschews gloomy soliloquies and melodramatic dialogue for his steely color treatment. What few colors that do breeze in appear to exhale from the poignant grays. The characters barely speak, most conspicuously during the movie's twenty-minute intrepid train robbery sequence in which the robber is dropped onto a moving train via helicopter, performs the robbery and gets back on. The film spotlights two strikingly constructed heists, the other one in a bank. The first is the hold-up of an isolated Riviera small-town seacoast bank. Melville painstakingly films the unlawful act, and how it goes awry when a ballsy teller declines to be robbed without a fight.'-- collaged
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*
p.s. Hey. ** Thomas Moronic, Hi, T! Man, thank you so much for sending the OT post. This week is going to be a TM-as-guest-host twofer, which I think is a first time ever thing on the blog, but that's how far behind I am on post construction for one thing, ha ha. The EIF3 post on Wednesday and the OT post on Saturday. You're a sweetheart, my friend. ** Wolf, Yeah, Chipotle is one of the kind of lower rung 'classy' Mexican fast food chains. So, now I know where they got their name. Sounds familiar. Yeah, it was probably in what I ate, and I had no clue. Your binary coding explanation sounds yum to me, but you know my love of being confused in a non-threatening way. Report back asap and aoayw! ** Lstnr, Hi, man! ** Tosh, I thought you might be pleased by the post, and I'm so glad you were. ** David Ehrenstein, I heard that new Petula Clark single the other day by accident. It's not horrible. Both trippy and scary that she's 80 years-old. Jesus. ** Sypha, Awesome that you liked the post. Oh, 'very funny', ha ha. That could mean anything. Okay, that makes more sense. That's awesome that you met up with Lee and got out and about. Yeah, obviously, getting out and refreshing your life and input with other people and places is a pretty important thing for all kinds of variations on your health -- physical, mental, emotional, etc. I like your plan, in other words. ** Misanthrope, Good, the hand was just throwing a tantrum. I don't think one can control the sleeping on the neck the wrong way thing no matter how long one has practiced. Eek, I hope you get that money back, obviously. I'm sure you will, but I hope it doesn't take yonks. The Neph has a funny idea of Europe and about what's valuable and European. Bring him a snowglobe. ** Cobaltfram, My 'Animal Crossing' days were post my drugging days, so, no. It takes a lot, and I mean a lot, to make me stay up all night doing anything. Well, nix on the scrapbook making suggestion then. Mm, good question about whether that TH piece's style/voice could sustain a novel. It would be a very interesting challenge. I think you would have to rupture it and refurnish its insides and strain it purposefully, but it might be possible. I don't nap, except in cases of jet lag and illness, because I can't turn my brain off when it's light. It just won't turn off. It wants to keep doing things, and it always wins. ** S., Sounds real good. Everyone, see S.'s latest stack construction, titled 'Fairy Glamortis', now with new editing software! Mm, I can't tell precisely what the new software did. They look cleaner? Formally only, I mean. ** Postitbreakup, Hi, Josh. Really good to see you, pal. Work's still going on? That's definitely good, un-heaven-like though it might be for you. Yeah, sounds like moving out and being poor might lose the battle, no? Ha ha, I charge for therapy on a sliding scale. In your case, my fee is that you just have to be you. ** Steevee, Hi. I'm finally seeing 'Spring Breakers' tonight. That's tough about your friend. At least he's warring with himself in an atmosphere and culture that's as welcoming as it's ever been. Maybe small comfort there, but still. On the Stom Sogo thing, wow, no, I had no idea. That's amazing! Well, now I have to try to see that short film somehow. Jeez, that's really quite an honor. Thank you so much for telling me that, man! ** Bollo, Hi, J. My weekend was real good. I hope yours was, at least. Great about the opening! Nice stuff to dig into. 'House' is crazy fun. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben! Thank you again so, so much! No problem whatsoever on the amendments. Cool about the booked tickets! Oh, I should say here what I said on FB. Everyone, if any chance you're planning to see a performance of 'The Pyre', my new theater/dance piece with Gisele, Stephen O'Malley, and Peter Rehberg, at the Pompidou in late May, the good news is that we've added a 4th show on June 1st, and the sort of bad news is that it looks all the shows will be sold out in the next week or two at the latest. So, you should reserve/buy tickets asap. Hooray for your brother! Well, and for the whole Robinson clan! ** Scunnard, As I look out my window, it seems as though the sun is still making up its mind about today. 'Animal Crossing' almost made me go literally insane. I think I might have mentioned this before, but when I finally erected the statue of myself in front of the train station and the game was over, I kept 'playing' for months out of pure guilt that the other residents would freak out and the place would go to hell. Scary. ** Flit, Hey, buddy. ** James, Hi, James. Yeah, wait until you're finished with the edit before you decide. That makes sense. Oh, I don't think publishers have any kind of pre-set idea about chapter titles. I can't imagine. If they don't like them, they'll probably just propose cutting them. That's not a make or break thing. Happy Monday to you! ** Mark Doten, Hi, Mark! Awesomeness itself to have you here, maestro! How's things? ** Lee Vincent, Hi, Lee! Welcome back! Cool. Yes, I read a bunch of things on the site over the weekend, and I saw that there was another contributor. Really fantastic writing of yours on there. I just downloaded a bunch of stuff I didn't know based on your reviews. Big thanks! I think Guyotat will be up your alley, based on what I know of your interests, yes. I would start with 'Eden Eden Eden'. It's the most intense and characteristic of the books of his that have been translated. Let me know what you think. I'm very interested to know. Have a swell, swell day. ** Chilly Jay Chill, Oh, man, I'm ordering the 'AME' DVD today. Say no more. Barring the unforeseen, I'm seeing 'Spring Breakers' tonight at last. Listening? The new Wire, which I really love. A bunch of the artists who were in that last 'Road Trip' gig. The new The Knife, which I'm not yet sure about. Mm, I can't remember what else. You? ** Matty B, Hi, Matty! Personally, I like the scrapbook form because of its physical resemblance to 'the book', the novel. That it seems to be asked to be read front to back, and can/should be depending on how you construct it, but it allows a more random, anarchic way of reading, unlike a novel. I find that helps me think about the space of a narrative and its relentlessly forward-moving trajectory in a more, I don't know, open and thorough way? I'm not sure I can explain why I find it so useful, and it could easily be that using a book form to make the scrapbook/collages is specifically useful to my stuff, but I do like building the preliminary, experimenting stuff inside the same form in which the novel itself will exist. Let me know what you end up doing and how it works/helps, if it does. ** Okay. The blog does an overview thing on Jean-Pierre Melville today, duh, and please see if you find it interesting or useful or anything, won't you? See you tomorrow.