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Co-author:
Cristina Álvarez López
This
text closely accompanies our 2013 audiovisual essay on Jean-Pierre
Melville, which can be seen here.
13
variations for 13 films, accompanied by the musical theme composed by
François de Roubaix for Le
samouraï (1967): the cinema of Jean-Pierre
Melville condensed into a series of motifs that travel from movie to
movie, reiterating and transforming, finding their full meaning only
when they are put into relation. A non-exhaustive collection, but
filled with recognisable images that clearly obsess this filmmaker.
(1)
1.
Jef
Costello’s second murder in Le
samouraï, Maite’s devastating death
at the end of L’Armée des ombres (1969), the shooting of Mattei and Vogel in Le
cercle rouge (1970) or – the most
paradigmatic example of all – of Maurice, Silien and Kern in Le
doulos (1962). It is the matter of a
rule with few exceptions, a pattern that is rarely broken: whenever
Melville’s characters are not holding an empty gun, they almost
always shoot twice. The second shot seems like a tragic echo of the
first; when we put these scenes in series, they form a strange,
musical choreography, a dance of death.
2.
In
the metaphoric title of his first feature film, Le
Silence de la mer (1949), it is evoked
in its absence; in Quand tu liras cette
lettre (1953), it is presented in
gorgeous black and white, like a set whose wild bountifulness
competes with the agitated passions of the characters, and even robs
the foreground from them; in L’Armée
des ombres, it amounts to a nocturnal,
Allied raft that swallows and spits out a phantom submarine; in the
opening of Un flic (1972), it is a clear, diluted blueness, a swirl of wind, rain and
waves that fiercely crash against a dike, prefiguring the tormented
destiny of the characters … The sea is a powerful presence in
Melville’s cinema, and the director revels in cataloguing its
chameleonic transformations, showing it in all its diverse states.
3.
“Any
other man stops and talks / But the walking man walks” (James
Taylor). Melville’s heroes walk, always alone, in a determined,
pensive, unbroken, but never hurried or troubled way, keeping their
inner thoughts to themselves. They measure out their destined
itinerary in the steps they take, and Melville plots his mise
en scène likewise. He respectfully and
patiently films this action in many ways: from a static position, in
a panning shot, backwards tracking, lateral tracking. The action
exists, too, to reveal the carefully chosen fragments of urban space:
by a bridge, along a tunnel, back streets, main streets.
4.
Shoes
– like gloves and overalls – constitute the work uniform of
Melville’s men; they are not part of the same style/image code as
the hats and coats. The shoes, moreover, have a specific purpose:
they are for robbing places (bank, house, casino, train), not for
making a kill-hit. So, they are designed, and used, to ensure
absolute silence on the job: a ballet of noiseless steps. Where hats,
hairstyles, cigarettes and other indices differentiate Melville’s
men, these on-the-job shoes – always the same kind – blend them,
indistinguishably and interchangeably, into a perfect working unit.
5.
In
a famous interview book, Rui Nogueira asks Melville about the white
gloves that Jef uses when he is about to fulfil a murder contract.
The director declares: “They are editor’s gloves”. (2) This
affirmation – in the guise of a playful but categorical mise
en abyme –
immediately suggests the self-conscious dimension of his cinema, as
well as the fine, ironic sense of this creator obsessed with the
thematic of destiny and tragedy. Melville’s response is that of a
grand conjurer, displacing the magic proper to cinema into the world
of the fiction. Because, in fact, when the heroes of Le
doulos, Le
samuraï or Le
circle rouge slip into their white gloves, they, too, are playing with the linear
chain of events, erasing characters from the frame, altering the
arrangement of the pieces, and splicing fragments together without
leaving a trace.
6.
After
the car, the train is the most important means of transportation in
Melville’s cinema. In Le cercle rouge,
there is the scene of spectacular escape from a guarded prison, and
in Un flic an elaborate heist that takes up one-third of the running time. In Les enfants terribles (1950), a train carries the siblings off on their one and only
adventure outside the house where they are usually secluded; and in Quand tu liras cette lettre,
a train functions as a death machine, secretly guided by the
protagonist’s desire. In these two films, united by their central
roles for women, both heroines are found in a surprisingly similar
gesture: they wipe their hand across a train window, as if it were a
windshield, in order to demist the glass.
7.
A
truly Melvillian image: a shot filmed from outside a car, with its
front or side window acting as a reframing device. Sometimes, when
the car stops, the camera remains static, and tension builds through
waiting. At other times, the image is transformed into a paean to the
artificiality created by those rear projections, old-fashioned but
always lovely, that allow us to observe the illusion of movement and
the unreal telescoping of different layers. In some of the films (Le
samouraï, Le
doulos), it is a purely poetic image –
the characters trapped within, as the raindrops slide down the
window’s exterior – that emanates something at once indifferent
yet claustrophobic, beautiful yet cold.
8.
The
trademark of Melville’s much-remarked Americanism is his love of
ritzy nightclub settings – usually built in and around his own
home/film studio. Their titles take the American rather than the
French possessive form – Martey’s, not Chez Martey – and they
each have their special showgirl choreography inside. Almost all
these places – with the exception of The Cotton Club – blare the
name of their owner (Santi, Ricci, Simon …); and that owner is
either associated with criminals, or a criminal himself. Melville, a
master at making so many Parisian street locations seem
interchangeable and almost dull backdrops to the intensely focused
action, reserves his showbiz fanfare for character’s entrances, and
the lit-up entranceways, into his proudly invented clubs.
9.
We
find, especially in Bob le flambeur (1956) but also in Les enfants
terribles, Leon
Morin, Priest (1961), Le
doulos and L’Armée
des ombres, the black and white squares
of a chess board, transformed into a scenic pattern for the design of
floors, walls and other elements of the décor. A graphic model that
might be incidental, or could have arisen purely because of a
particular period’s fashions – but which can hardly go
unremarked, since it anticipates, almost subliminally, “some of the
constants accumulated by Melville’s cinema: symmetrical
trajectories, opposed characters, and strategic mobility”. (3)
10.
In A Companion
to François Truffaut (Wiley Blackwell,
2013), Arnaud Desplechin observes that the hardest thing to
incorporate in a movie is a newspaper: if it’s too real, too
specific, too politically partial or slanted, it risks throwing the
story (and the spectator) off-course. Inserts of newspaper items are
central to Melville’s cinema, completely integrated into his
universe: brutally factual announcements of crimes and deaths (‘fatal
accident’, ‘bloody hold-up’, ‘sensational jewel theft’),
comprising headlines, text and an occasional mugshot – the identity
of the newspaper itself rarely matters, or figures. Plot intrigue, at
these moments, is flattened out to the indifferent, ephemeral level
of daily news reporting – while also marking, in this long-gone,
pre-digital media sphere, one of the few ways in which information
travels to criminals and law enforcers alike.
11.
“If
to direct is a glance, to edit is a beating of the heart”. Godard said it well (in 1956), but every good director gives the immortal
shot/reverse shot exchange of glances its own inflection. The
exchange of looks in Melville captures the two stark poles of the
intersubjective logic that structures his entire cinematic universe.
There is the cold, blank look (of Alain Delon, especially): the look
that can be returned, but never penetrated, and that provokes a
short-circuiting of desire (Le cercle
rouge). Then there is the look that
signals an abysmal turning-point, the complete suction of power out
of one character and into the other: such is the crucial moment in Le
samouraï when Jef glimpses the woman
who now holds the key to his tragic destiny; or also the charged
ending of Le Silence de la mer,
where the heroine’s look marks almost a surrender to the German
officer, putting an end to their war. Then there is a bonus: the
strange, permutational, vertiginous free-play of looks between a
threesome of characters in Un flic – this is an uncontrollable histrionics of the look, which seems to
mime suspicion and doubt, when in fact everyone involved has always
known more than they appear to know.
12.
Characters
seeing their image in mirrors forms a dramatic instants of pause, of
punctuation, in Melville. (4) On one level, the meaning of these
images is conventional: they signal moments in which characters truly
see – or have a chance to grasp – themselves. But the pictorial
insistence of this motif, plus Melville’s mania for tracing frames
within frames for such portraits of stillness, suggests something
graver and more secretive: a gesture in which his characters are both
monumentalised and immortalised, even if only fleetingly, and in the
perfectly domestic, banal prop of a piece of glass above a sink.
13.
Synecdoche,
Melville: a man is his hat. His heroes are normally never apart from
their hats (which they wear so perfectly, so elegantly); if they ever
do part, whether through the heroes losing them, leaving them behind,
or somehow being separated from them, it is a certain sign of
approaching death. In Le samouraï,
the moment that Jef leaves his hat but does not take his check number
signals that he will never be coming back for it; likewise, in Le
doulos, the unlucky number of 13 placed
into the ribbon of a headless hat spells doom for its former wearer.
In the end, there is only ever the hat: mute, static, frozen,
inhuman.
NOTES
1.
For further motifs and patterns in Melville, see Roland-François
Lack [1960-2021], "Un flic:
art and artifice (and also cars and hats and blondes)". back
2.
Rui Nogueira, Melville on Melville (London: Secker and Warburg, 1971). back
3.
Cristina Álvarez López, “Hermetismo de un cineasta”, Caimán.
Cuadernos de cine, no. 18 (July-August
2013), p. 72. back
4.
For a detailed analysis of the role of mirrors and hats in Melville’s mise en scène,
see Carlos Losilla,
“El teorema del espejo y el sombrero. La
madurez de una puesta en escena”, Nosferatu,
no. 13 (October 1993), pp. 48-57. back
© Cristina Álvarez López & Adrian Martin August 2013 |
