OCCUPYING A UNIQUE PLACE IN WAR FILM
The ‘comparatively fathomable’ Nazi hold on France has allowed film-makers to tackle WWII in bold new ways
Compared with the atrocities perpetrated in World War II’s other theatres, the German occupation of France was, in the historian David Bell’s unsentimental characterisation, a “sideshow”. Quentin Tarantino would never have set Inglourious Basterds in Poland; the Woody Allen character’s obsession with The Sorrow and the Pity, in Annie Hall, would hardly be so funny if he were fixated on Schindler’s List.
“That France’s war was comparatively fathomable makes it oddly more approachable than the events to the east, or in the Pacific. It inspires less sheer horror, and more empathy and fascination,” Bell wrote several years ago in The New Republic. “In the imagined moral landscape of that dreadful time, Vichy France occupies a murky, unsettling and endlessly intriguing middle ground.”
French film-makers have regularly tilled that ground — some repeatedly, like Rene Clement, whose Forbidden Games (1952) was recently re-released, and Jean-Pierre Melville, whose first feature, Le Silence de la Mer ( The Silence of the Sea, 1949), is newly out from Criterion in Blu-ray and DVD editions laden with extras.
Melville (1917-73), born Jean-Pierre Grumbach to a prosperous family of Alsatian Jews, was one of the few French film-makers to actually participate in La Resistance. He kept his nom de guerre after the war, along with a burning desire to film Le Silence de la Mer, a slim novel — pseudonymously written by the illustrator Jean Bruller under the name Vercors and clandestinely distributed, often in handwritten copies, throughout wartime France.
Vercors’ novel offered a powerful metaphor for resistance. An elderly Frenchman and his young niece, living in a small town, are compelled to billet a German lieutenant. Their defiance is expressed in their refusal to speak to or otherwise acknowledge their uninvited guest, despite his elaborate politeness, evident cultivation and much-professed love for France. They maintain their silence even after the lieutenant is disabused of his illusions, learning of the mass exterminations at Treblinka and the Nazi intention to crush France’s soul.
As Vercors refused all attempts to film Le Silence, Melville promised to shoot his low-budget independent adaptation and withhold its release if the writer and his advisers did not approve of it. They did, although the movie, made in 1947 under neo-realist conditions (hand-to-mouth financing, a non-union crew, Vercors’ home as a location) was not released for several years. The mode is ascetic. In its unadorned “documentation” of a text, Le Silence anticipates Robert Bresson’s 1951 Diary of a Country Priest. Melville would later describe his style as “anti-cinematographic”, saying that he wanted to make a film “from which movement and action would be more or less banished”.
The old man’s voice-over narration is incantatory; once the lieutenant begins showing up each night in civilian clothes to continue what his host mentally characterises as “the long rhapsody of his discovery of France”, the movie is powerfully repetitive. The German, whom Vercors modelled on the sensitive military writer Ernst Junger, is an innocent monster with a vague resemblance to Boris Karloff. His maddening enthusiasm for French culture is more oppressive than any contempt.
Melville would return to the subject of occupied France with Leon Morin, Priest (1961) and Army of Shadows (1969), which, like Le Silence de la Mer, was based on a notable work of resistance literature. (In between, he made the frugal films noir that so impressed the directors of the French new wave.) Leon Morin is, like Silence, a self-contained near-chamber piece. And even Army of Shadows, Melville’s career-capping masterpiece, is an essentially philosophical movie in which combat is constant, but a conventional battlefield does not exist.