Le Silence de la Mer (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1948)

Jean-Marie Robain, Howard Vernon, and Nicole Stéphane in Le Silence de la Mer 

Werner von Ebrennac: Howard Vernon
The Niece: Nicole Stéphane
The Uncle: Jean-Marie Robain
The Fiancée: Ami Aaroë
The Orderly: Georges Patrix
The Friend: Denis Sadier

Director: Jean-Pierre Melville
Screenplay: Jean-Pierre Melville
Based on a novel by Jean Bruller aka Vercors
Cinematography: Henri Decaë
Film editing: Henri Decaë, Jean-Pierre Melville
Music: Edgar Bischoff

Le Silence de la Mer marked an extraordinary double debut: This was the first feature film for not only its writer and director, Jean-Pierre Melville, but also its cinematographer, Henri Decaë. Both were working under handicaps of budget and location -- the film was made in the home of Jean Bruller, who wrote and published the celebrated underground novel under a pseudonym, Vercors. Exterior shots, such as the countryside and the glimpses of Paris, were filmed mostly on the fly and sometimes rely for their effect more on editing than on camerawork. But it's the spareness and somewhat makeshift quality of the making of the film that gives it such a haunting quality. The novel was embraced by the French Resistance for its object lesson in resisting: Forced to house a German officer during the occupation, an elderly man and his young niece remain completely silent whenever he is present. The German comes to accept this silent treatment, and visits the two in the evening to deliver monologues about his life and his ideals, which were awakened, he says, by the Nazis. He sees the German occupation as a step toward a uniting of Germany and France. He admires French culture to the extreme, particularly its literature, fondling the volumes on the shelves in the room as the Frenchman smokes his pipe and the niece does her mending and knitting. The Germans, on the other hand, he claims are superior in music -- he was a composer before he became a soldier -- and he once sits down at the harmonium in the room to play a Bach prelude. The Frenchman occasionally gives a flicker of wanting to respond to the German's statements, but his niece's steadfast silence hold him in check. These visits continue from winter into summer, when the German goes away to Paris to meet with the German command. He returns a changed man: He has learned to his horror of the death camps and of the designs of the Nazis to obliterate the French culture he so admires. At the end he goes away, having volunteered to serve at the front, a suicidal gesture, and the niece speaks, in a faint whisper, the only word she has ventured in his presence: "Adieu." Melville's manipulation of the relations among the three characters, only one of whom speaks, is extraordinarily subtle, and Decaë's brilliant use of light and shadow -- when we first see the German, he emerges from the darkness in the doorway in a glare of light that makes him look like a sinister presence -- adds immeasurably to the quiet drama of the film.

Les Enfants Terribles (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1950)

Les Enfants Terribles was released in the United States as The Strange Ones, which has the effect of reducing monstrosity to mere nonconformity. For the siblings Elisabeth (Nicole Stéphane) and Paul (Édouard Dermithe) are monsters, even if they are perhaps more destructive to each other than they are to other people. Not that Jean Cocteau, who adapted the screenplay from his own novel, had anything against monsters: He created the most memorable non-animated version of Beauty and the Beast (1946), after all. Les Enfants Terribles was an uneasy collaboration between Cocteau and director Jean-Pierre Melville; being no slouch as a director himself, Cocteau was capable of imposing his ideas on Melville, who was almost 30 years younger. But somehow they prevailed and produced a film that is either a "masterpiece," as David Thomson calls it, or "pretentious poppycock," as Bosley Crowther, the New York Times critic, called it. I trust Thomson's judgments far more than those of Crowther, a notorious fuddy-duddy, but I prefer to think of the film as not "either/or" but instead "both/and." It's certainly not poppycock in any case, especially in its depiction of adolescence as a kind of fever dream, and the way incest flickers around the relationship of Paul and Elisabeth like heat lightning. But there is certainly a whiff of pretentiousness in the voiceover narration (by Cocteau himself) that hammers home the folie à deux of the siblings, which is apparent without any comment. If it's a masterpiece, which I'm not entirely confident in calling it, it becomes one from Melville's staging, in collaboration with production designer Emile Mathys, Henri Decaë's cinematography, and especially the performance of Stéphane, whose invocation of Lady Macbeth in one scene makes me wish she had played the part on film. Melville didn't want to cast Dermithe, Cocteau's lover, in the role of Paul, and I think he was right. At 25, Dermithe was too old and too sturdy to play the neurasthenic 16-year-old who is felled by a snowball. But Renée Cosima is impressive in the dual role of Dargelos, the schoolboy who throws the snowball, and Agathe, who falls into Elisabeth's clutches as a weapon with which to torment her brother.