Post-war crimes – Weekend – Kommersant
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Detectives are considered an effective way to kill time, especially in those periods when you really want to kill, catch and neutralize time, as in most films that have entered the history of cinema under the name “noir”. This special subspecies of detective cinema arose in the darkest of eras, on the eve of World War II, and therefore the heroes here play cat and mouse not with each other, but with fate, often synonymous with time. Jean-Pierre Melville is a recognized master of noir in post-war France, he fought for her release, but deep down he doubted: does a country deserve freedom, instantly agreeing to collaborate with the Nazis? Filming classic detective novels or taking plots out of his head, each time Melville settled scores with time – he hated the past, denied the present, suspected an even more dangerous and vile enemy in the future.
Jean-Pierre Melville is buried in the largest cemetery in France – Panten. Here lie – division by division – either laid down their lives in the war, or returned from it as heroes. Pantin is very different from Père Lachaise or Montparnasse, the resting places of many celebrities. The situation is noticeably stricter, most of the graves are in disrepair, the war in modern Europe, especially in its heart – Paris, today has few fans. The names of all the soldiers are known, but no one brings them flowers, like Sartre or Jim Morrison. And about the fact that here, as the Latin proverb says, the steps of the godfather of the new wave and the hero of the Resistance Jean-Pierre Grumbach with the call sign Melville “fell silent”, even the administration does not know. Melville’s grave is no longer to be found. Maybe because he had no children or students, and all the followers like Quentin Tarantino, John Woo or Spike Lee live too far across the ocean.
On Panten, it seems that war is a permanent state of mankind, it, like its inseparable companion death, simultaneously wreaks havoc and disciplines. Melville’s debut film The Silence of the Sea (1947), based on the novel by Vercors, sacred to every Frenchman of those years, tells about the silence that accompanies war, about a special resistance that is expressed in deaf silence. The main characters – an uncle and niece, living in a sleepy, snow-covered province, are forced to provide shelter to the German officer Werner von Ebrennac. An enthusiastic type, full of ideals, later this image of an “enlightened” Nazi will wander through world literature and cinema, turning into almost a canon. Among the most recent examples, we can recall Jonathan Littell’s The Benevolent or Andrei Konchalovsky’s Paradise – both here and there the refinement of the killer’s tastes emphasizes the sad fact that neither Schiller, nor Caspar David Friedrich, nor even Schopenhauer and Beethoven saved a person from a dormant there is an animal in it.
In Vercors, the protagonists believe silence is the only way to resist the occupation: for weeks they stubbornly refuse to talk with the aggressor – to discuss literature and music with him, to argue on philosophical topics. So, long winter months pass in mournful silence, and in the spring von Ebrennach, finally realizing on which side he is fighting, volunteers to leave for the Eastern Front. This is the decision of the modern samurai, war as an ideal condition for suicide. Before leaving, Ebrennac will hear the first and last word from the lips of the opponents who sheltered him against their will: “Farewell.” And on the table he will find a note with a quote from Anatole France: “Disobedience to a criminal order is a noble deed for a soldier.”
Melville, one of the first to respond to de Gaulle’s call to join the Free French forces in Great Britain, spent the entire war in arms, from the Vosges to Cassino. His older brother Jacques, also a prominent member of the Resistance, died crossing the Pyrenees in November 1942; he was supposed to deliver money to headquarters in London, but the smugglers accompanying him, after Jacques broke his ankle, got rid of the wounded – they shot and threw the body into the gorge.
Dreaming from his youth, as soon as his parents gave him the legendary model of the Pathe-Baby film projector, to shoot American-style hard-boiled noirs, sitting around the clock in the Apollo cinema on Boulevard Clichy, idolizing Frank Capra, John Ford and William Wyler (among cinephiles the famous list of 63 films compiled by Melville exclusively from pre-war films is still quoted), Jean-Pierre Grumbach returned from the war with intentions that had nothing to do with his past life. For the past life is over. Whatever professional politicians or martinet generals said after the victory – about the restoration of the former order, about a civilization that had survived – Melville was absolutely convinced that the decline of Europe had happened, that the sun of humanism had disappeared beyond the horizon forever, and indeed its very line, according to which mankind has been guided by for centuries, is already indistinguishable.
Melville, who before the war professed leftist views, who read Le Populaire and La Revolte like a Bible, stopped sympathizing with the communists in the person of Leon Blum after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Neither the left nor the moderate right could prevent the catastrophe. And the pariahs, that is, the gangsters whom the romantic Jean-Pierre admired as a child, all these lone wolves, celebrated by the camera of Curtis, Cukor or Houston, huddled together and began to cooperate with the French secret police and the Gestapo with amazing zeal. For example, the prototypes of Capella and Siffredi from Borsalino, the bandits Carbon and Spirito – there were legends about their “exploits” before the occupation – collaborated throughout the war with the notorious Simon Sabiani and Jacques Doriot, leader of the PPF fascist party. Carbon was even a member of the infamous LVF (Legion of French Volunteers Against Bolshevism), and Spirito joined the so-called La Carlingue, the French branch of the Gestapo.
Thus, the fatalism of Hollywood noirs, the mechanical doom of the characters, enchanted by fate, like the Gorgon Medusa, acquired a new existential dimension in Melville. These are not desperate, but desperate characters in any possibility of a happy ending. It doesn’t matter which of the 13 films completed (there were many more in the plans and developments) by Melville. Whether it’s harsh military dramas full of details peeped by the author at the front and in the underground, like “Army of Shadows” and “Leon Moren, Priest”, or classic gangster trilogies with Jean-Paul Belmondo and Alain Delon – from “Senior Ferchault” to “Spy “And” Samurai “, everywhere there are heroes who have already lost their war and lost their lives. The territory of Melville is an afterlife zone. And in this sense, the borderline, separating the period of Belmondo from the period of Delon, is characteristic of the film “Second Wind” with Lino Ventura, the alter ego of the director, a strong fighter, reincarnated according to the script as an overweight bear cub. “Second Wind” – a monumental gangster saga based on the novel of the same name by José Giovanni (a unique character in French cinema of the sixties and seventies: a bandit and murderer sentenced to death after the war, was pardoned at the last moment and reforged into a bestselling author and star screenwriter), begins from a fleeting, lazy, but incredibly significant dialogue for the Melville universe between the owner of a tavern frequented by criminal thugs and a regular client with a guilty conscience.
— What did you do last night?
– Wasted time at the movies.
In a second, a rival gang will burst into the institution and shoot all this audience, in which it is impossible to distinguish the viewer of someone else’s life from the actor of their own, and the bandit from the policeman. Fanatical about the smallest details of the interior, Melville liked to repeat in an interview: “I’m not interested in realism, my films are essentially fantasy.” But the fantastic thing in his films is that the dead appear on the screen, as if they are no different from the living. There is only one difference: they do not cling, they do not fight for their existence – as soon as it has already ended. What is this, if not another interpretation of the maxim of Anatole France from the “Silence of the Sea” – sometimes disobedience to the violence of life consists in voluntary death.
Godard, who was close friends until the end of the sixties with Melville, once noticed that with each of his films he hints to the public: those who went through that war made an unforgivable mistake – they survived. The Apocalypse has no future, only an endlessly unfolding ending. It was this ending time after time that Melville recreated in the cinema – the kingdom of shadows. All his characters are passionate about only one thing – death. Their goal is to die, it is no coincidence that each death – Jeff Costello in “Samurai” or Silien in “Informer” – occurs with a smile, almost childish joy from the long-awaited return home reigns on the faces of the breathtaking Delon and Belmondo.
Instructing his stars before the take, Melville often quoted an inscription from a Renaissance fresco, in which a cavalcade of the dead meets a troop of pomaded aristocrats, greeting them with the phrase: “We were like you, you will become like us.” For the war has turned even the survivors into the dead, depriving them of the right to hope.
Isn’t that why Godard, who invited Melville to play a cameo role in his manifesto “On the last breath”, put into the mouth of the writer Parvulescu, who was giving a press conference right at the Orly airport, which instantly became a cult remark. When asked by a journalist about her creative plans, Melville-Parvulescu replies: “Become immortal, and then die.”
Melville, who immortalized the Paris of the 1950s and 1960s — all those nightly cabarets with obligatory jazz, striptease and double bourbon, in which ice melts either from the heat of passions, or from human indifference — actually filmed Paris, which did not exist, and indeed could no longer be. According to Melville, Paris, like the Parisians, hardly had the right to exist after the war. Having inspired a new wave with his cinematic Bushido and largely encouraged its accomplishments, Melville, in essence, believed that only the flowers of evil would always grow on the ashes of the Second World War, and as many years as it takes for a grave, for example, his own, to remove the curse, come to a complete standstill. But now seventy years have passed, and in Europe there is a new war. Doesn’t this mean that Melville was partly mistaken, aestheticizing silence, and silence is not the last act of resistance, but only capitulation?
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