Melville on Melville (Cinema one, 16)

Because of the vagaries of film distribution, Jean-Pierre Melville's status as a major French film-maker has yet to be recognized abroad; but it is only a matter of time before this remarkable man (b. 1917) is acknowledged as the spiritual father of the French New Wave, as a decisive influence on Robert Bresson's idiosyncratic approach to film-making, and as a director so impregnated by his love of all things American that he has, in effect, transplanted the best elements of Hollywood film-making into a classical French style. His recent films, thrillers set in the French gangster milieu, are - as he says - Westerns transplanted to a new environment. In this book-length interview with Rui Nogueira, Melville not only explores and analyzes his own films, his theories, and his approach to the cinema, but explains how, in 1947, he defied the unions to make his first film, Le Silence de la Mer, without authorization or assistance of any kind, and without even obtaining the rights to the Vercors novel on which the film is based. The story continues with the great succès d'estime of Le Silence de la Mer when it was finally completed and shown after enormous difficulties had been overcome; how his use of an off-screen narrator and his pared-down, poetic style in this film were subsequently annexed and developed by Bresson; how Jean Cocteau's enthusiasm led to a summons to film Les Enfants Terribles, occasioning an affectionate but fretful clash of temperaments; how, partly from inclination and partly from economic necessity, he began to use location shooting and hand-held cameras in low-budgeted films such as Bob le Flambeur and Deux Hommes dans Manhattan, which then became models for the New Wave revolution; and perhaps most interesting of all, how his encyclopedic knowledge of Hollywood films of the thirties shaped and influenced his own work.