Le Silence de la mer (1949)
Directed by Jean-Pierre Melville

Film Review

It was during a visit to England in 1943 that Jean-Pierre Melville, an active member in the French resistance, came across an English translation of the novella Le Silence de la mer by the renowned French resistance writer Vercors and committed himself to adapting it into a full-length film.  The odds against Melville fulfilling this ambition were enormous. He had had no previous experience of making a film, had no contacts in the French film industry, and was turned down point-blank when he offered to buy the rights from Vercors, who felt that any adaptation would compromise the book's integrity.  Yet Melville doggedly persevered, overcame all of the obstacles that came his way, and ultimately delivered a cinematic landmark.  Not only was his Silence de la mer the most important film about the French resistance but, in cinematic terms, it marked a dramatic break with the past.  Melville's new approach to filmmaking would reshape the landscape of French cinema for over a decade and provided the impetus for the French New Wave.  In the course of his career, Melville would make many great films, but none would have greater signficance than his first feature, Le Silence de la mer.

The biggest challenge that confronted Melville was to persuade Vercors to give his permission for the film to be made.  The writer grudgingly acquiesced when Melville said he would show the film to a jury of former resistance members and would destroy the negative if any of them felt it was unfaithful to the spirit of the novel.   Melville even persuaded Vercors to allow most of the film to be recorded in his own house, the house in which the book had been written, believing that this would lend greater authenticity to the film.  As it turned out, this latter arrangement was far from satisfactory from Melville's point of view and it did nothing to soften Vercors' antipathy for the venture.  Even when the occupation was over, Vercors' novella still retained something of the character of a sacred text for many French people.  Within months of its first clandestine publication in February 1942 it was greatly esteemed by those who were involved with the French resistance - just to read it was considered an act of defiance against the Nazis.  Melville's own firsthand experiences in the resistance and a fierce sense of independence made him the best person to bring Vercors' potent anti-Nazi statement to the screen.  This was confirmed when only one of the twenty-four resistance veterans who previewed the film disapproved of it (and that one dissenting vote was disqualified by Vercors himself). 

Immediately on its release, Melville's Le Silence de la mer was hailed as a masterpiece by many film critics of the time, included the leading critic André Bazin who offered fulsome praise for the film's literary quality, which captured not just the substance of Vercors' novel, but also its soul.  The film was also a surprising commercial success, attracting an audience of 1.3 million - an impressive figure for a film that was made on a budget of 120 thousand francs, one tenth of what a conventional studio film cost.  The eminent writer Jean Cocteau was so impressed with what he saw that he at once invited Melville to direct his next film, Les Enfants terribles.  The film did however attract considerable hostility from some quarters, notably the unions who resented Melville's flouting of union rules; at each showing of the film, the projector had to be guarded to prevent the reels from being seized and destroyed by incensed union members.

The success of Le Silence de la mer can be put down to two things - Melville's radically new approach to cinema, which boldly shattered many of the conventions that had limited the scope for innovation in French cinema for much of the past two decades, and the fact that it caught the public Zeitgeist perfectly and played a significant part in France's post-Liberation catharsis.  When he set out to make the film, Melville had no intention of aligning himself with the French film industry, which, at the time, was highly regulated, very cliquey and heavily controlled by powerful unions.  In an edition of L'Écran français (a forerunner to Les Cahiers du cinéma) which promoted Le Silence de la mer (No. 201, 3/5/1949), Melville offered an impassioned plea for a new kind of cinema:  "Do we always have to adhere to the same rules that have been followed a thousand times and which, for good or bad, only deliver five good films?  Can we not try something different?  Should we not, enriched by the lessons we have learned, try to renovate an art form?"  By deliberately choosing to opt out of the system by which films were made in France, Melville set himself up as the model independent filmmaker, and it is undoubtedly the artistic freedom that this gave him which made him one of the most influential and innovative French filmmakers of his time.

Equally important for the film's impact was that it was perfectly judged to capture the public mood of its time.  After the Liberation, the French nation sought to rid itself of the shame of occupation, and one way to achieve this was to hype up the role that the resistance played during the war.  Films such as Le Silence de la mer and René Clément's La Bataille du rail (1946) and Le Père tranquille (1946) added substance to the myth that during the war France had been a nation of resistance fighters who were constantly striving to overcome the Nazi occupation.  It was not until the late 1960s that the true picture emerged, partly through films such as Marcel Ophüls' Le Chagrin et la pitié (1969), and it became evident that only a very small proportion of the French population had supported the resistance.  Perhaps the real value of Le Silence de la mer was that it helped France to regain her dignity at a time when the humiliation and the shame of occupation hung over the country like a dark cloud of incessant mourning, perpetuating a lie, but a very necessary lie.

The film's depiction of resistance is subtle, even ambiguous, and this has created some speculation as to whether Melville was being subtly ironic in his treatment of Vercors' novel.  The way in which the two main French characters - an old man and his niece - choose to defy the occupation (represented by the German officer who is billeted with them) is merely to keep their silence.  On the face of it, this hardly appears to be resistance at all - just two characters blithely ignoring the presence of the Germans and carrying on as though nothing had changed.  But, as we become conscious of the effect that the German officer, von Ebrennac, is having on these two characters, we realise that theirs is indeed a determined act of defiance, since they must repress their own feelings and behave in a manner that is contrary to their true nature.  The question you could then ask is: how is this different from the behaviour of the majority of French people who did not participate in the resistance but merely got on with their lives without taking a position for or against the occupation?  What indeed do we mean by resistance - must it inevitably involve armed struggle, or is it simply to hold out, like a plant courageously resisting the cold frosts of winter?

Just as the film's two résistants do not live up our stereotypical notion of the French resistance, neither does its main German character fit the familiar caricature of the fanatical guntoting Nazi.  Far from being the archetypal Nazi brute, von Ebrennac is a cultured man who shows nothing but courtesy to his hosts.  He sincerely believes his fanciful idea about a Franco-German Utopia in which the peoples of both country will live together in harmony, each benefiting from the other's cultural heritage.  It is only when he goes off to Paris and consorts with his fellow officers (who are fanatical guntoting brutes) that von Ebrennac realises the extent of his delusion.  The Beauty and the Beast allegory which he had previously used to characterise the present relationship between France and Germany proves to be apt indeed, except that now the Teutonic Beast is revealed to be a savage barbarian who has no hope of being transformed into a noble prince.   The silence of the old man and his niece fulfils its purpose - they retain their honour and their enemy is made to realise that what he represents is darkness, not light.

It is the unrelenting tension between the three main protagonists which so powerfully evokes the spirit of resistance that is felt in Vercors' book.  Melville sustains the tension through his minimalist yet highly stylised mise-en-scène, which allows us to penetrate the psyche of the German officer and his two unwilling hosts.  Melville's technique here is far more modest and restrained than in any of his subsequent films and is more characteristic of his contemporary Robert Bresson.  Of particular note is Melville's use of sound.   The harsh silence of the old man and his niece is accentuated by the relentless ticking of a clock.  The old man betrays his feelings to us through effective use of the internal monologue, whilst his niece remains unnaturally silent, as though she were a ghost.  It is interesting that in all of Melville's subsequent films, his female characters are almost invariably inexpressive and doll-like, as if to suggest they have no real part to play in his male-dominated dreamscapes other than to precipitate the hero's downfall, like the archetypal femme fatale of classic film noir.   The silence of the women is one of the defining characteristics of Melville's films, and it is extremely unsettling.

What contributes most to the film's oppressive aura is its unusual interior lighting and camera positioning, which owe much to German expressionism.  Melville and his first-time cinematographer Henri Decaë broke practically all of the rules of the game - deliberately over-lighting or under-lighting scenes for dramatic effect and using camera angles which would have been deemed ludicrously eccentric by most professional filmmakers of the time.  When the German officer is first introduced to us, he is seen in an extreme close-up from a very low camera angle, as though to emphasise his authority.  As he fails to break through his hosts' wall of silence, von Ebrennac's authority seems to ebb away and he is soon reduced to an ordinary man whose only weapons are words, words that hurt his opponents in ways that he cannot realise but which fail to win him the victory he seeks.  The stark lighting emphasises repeatedly the unbridgeable gulf that exists between the German officer and his hosts.   By contrast, the exterior sequences are shot in a far more naturalistic manner, almost as a documentary.  These two starkly contrasting cinematic styles suggest two worlds, the external world, which the Nazis have so visibly conquered, and the internal world of the defiant human soul, which the Nazis will never claim victory over.

Le Silence de la mer represented an iconoclastic assault on the prevailing situation in the French film industry and would have a far-reaching impact, inspiring a whole generation of new independent filmmakers to follow Melville's example.  The seeds of the French New Wave were sown here, and the harvest would be bountiful indeed.  Nouvelle vague directors such as François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard would venerate Jean-Pierre Melville as a shining example of the film auteur and would take their inspiration from his early films.  Melville himself would have a further impact on French cinema through his stylish American-flavoured gangster films - Le Doulos (1962), Le Samouraï (1967) and Le Cercle rouge (1970), revisiting the dark and treacherous world of the French resistance in his 1969 masterpiece, L'Armée des ombres (1969).  Whoever first coined the phrase silence is golden may well have had Jean-Pierre Melville's first film in mind - a captivating little masterwork that could hardly fail to unleash a tsunami on French cinema.

Film Synopsis

In the winter of 1941, a German officer, Werner von Ebrennac, is billeted to a house in a small town in Nazi occupied France.  His hosts are an old man and his niece who, to show their contempt for him, refuse ever to speak to him.  Each evening, when they are together, von Ebrennac tries to strike up a conversation by recounting his idyllic past in Germany and expressing his profound love for French culture.  Nothing the German officer says appears to affect the old man and his niece and their silence remains unbroken.  After spending a fortnight's leave in Paris, von Ebrennac returns to the little house a changed man.  He now understands why his hosts are so unwilling to talk to him...