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Author: Jonathan Rosenbaum Translation: Lannie Proofreader: Death
40 years after its release, French director Jean-Pierre Melville's masterpiece on the anti-Nazi movement finally made its debut in the United States.
Around 1971, Jean-Pierre Melville said, "[when I'm thinking about the reviews of The Lone Killer and Shadow Troopers], I often make the comment that 'Melville has become a Bressonist,' but I'm sorry, the correct logic would be that Bresson has always been Melville."
Shadow Troops (1969)
Melville's claim, echoed by critic Andrew Bazin and claimed to support it by Robert Bresson himself, seems a bit staggering. Melville is known for his eight film noirs, all of which are elegant.
Unlike Bresson's more grounded, newer realism, Melville's films appear even a little unreal. But these differences are only superficial. The similarities between the two filmmakers are actually more important: the style, the theme, and their respective philosophical positions can be traced directly back to their experiences during World War II.
Before France was occupied, Bresson spent nine months in German concentration camps between 1940 and 1941. This experience of incarceration is evident in one of his most prominent films, Escape from a Death Row Prisoner (1956).
Death Row Escape (1956)
Melville (formerly known as Jean-Pierre Gobak), joined the Resistance in the early 1940s, changing his Jewish surname to "Cartier" and then "Melville" as a tribute to Hermann Melville. Three of his 13 works were produced after the war and tell the story of the German occupation.
1948's Still As The Sea was his first film. Father Leon Mohan in 1961 gave him great commercial success. But 1969's Shadow Troops is his only work that reflects the Resistance. Now "Shadow Troops" has come to the United States and is first released at the Music Box Theater.
(The film's current English title is much better than the previous two titles, Army in the Shadows and The Shadow Army, because, as the critic J. According to Hoberman, the name of The Army of Shadows is more intuitive and apt —all the soldiers in the army are doomed to die. ）
Both Melville and Bresson's work is filled with despair, while the despair in Shadow Trooper is devastating. At first I didn't even want to admit that it was a good work, but now I think it should be Melville's best work. I have always resisted melville's work of exaggerating too much about the stoicism of manhood and the implicit emotional outbursts.
I like his black and white films more than his color films. And in that film, his use of color was so restrained that in my mind, it was almost a black-and-white film. The two-and-a-half-hour film depicts a middle-aged resistance leader named Jepier (Lino Ventura) and his comrades who make difficult choices step by step, only to end in vain.
In addition, they had to decide whether to execute a noble and courageous member of the Resistance, as she was captured and tortured by the Gestapo (secret police). They didn't know if she had been tortured, but they wanted to make sure it didn't happen. Torture runs through the entire film, and although Melville doesn't show it at all, he just concentrates on the ending, which is enough for the audience to feel bad.
Shadow Trooper is based on Joseph Cosell's novel of the same name (Cosell is also the author of the novel of the same name for director Louis Buñuel's film Day Beauty). Melville first read Shadow Troops in 1943, and it is said that the original book is much more positive than the film.
Like his other films, it shows the solitary personalities of many of the characters coming from their secret trauma, which is the subject of one of his favorite films, Nightfall, which he is said to have seen more than a dozen times. It would be interesting to speculate on the autobiographical nature of the film.
Bresson hid his life from public scrutiny, whereas Serville was not, and he hid fictional characters to the public in another way. (For example, Jean-Luc Godard's Exhausted, in which Melville starred and admitted that the novelist Parvulesco was actually himself.)
All of Melville's work is full of subtext, and the most obvious subtext in Shadow Troopers is the holocaust. In the hearts of many surviving Jews, the deepest wound lurking came from the guilt of surviving the corpse.
But this is not the case with The Havoc (1985), a documentary that shows metaphorical defeatism so vividly that no one can stand out.
Claude Lantzmann, the director of Havoc, has been steeped in existentialist ideas (Claude Lanzmann is also the editor of the French magazine Les Temps Modernes, founded in 1945 by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir) as a member of this critical community, as has Melville, who has been invisibly influenced by this.
The Havoc (1985)
Juliet Greco is the official singer of existentialism and a friend of Melville' and starred in his third film.
Existentialists believe that difficult choices are necessary, and that necessity is what determines that the Holocaust is much more of a relief than a tumultuous respite than Schindler's List. This necessity also explains why much of the anxiety in Shadow Troopers is intertwined with moral conflict, as in Hitchcock's masterpieces.
I couldn't reconcile the realism in Shadow Troop with the Mannerism in Melville's film noir until I read David Gill's 1982 review for Still As The Sea and Bob the Gambler (pictured in 1955, Melville's first film noir):
"Many of Melville's works are full of contradictions: behind the unsociable silence is firmness, strength and integrity, but at the same time a kind of death; when silence is broken—it must be broken—life and emotion come in, just to be completely destroyed. Melville's film is a rebellion against a world out of nowhere, a necessary but deadly rebellion."
Whether Or not Jill had seen Shadow Troopers before saying these words, he had a perfect grasp of Melville's essence of blending pessimism into war movies.
Jill's comments are too abstract and esoteric, but the most interesting thing about Shadow Troopers is how we see the bad decisions made by the resistance fighters. For example, the noble and brave warrior we mentioned earlier, played by Simon Signelle, we see her make one of the worst decisions.
The role played by Signère has been kept strictly confidential about her underground activities, even to her husband and daughter. Although Jeppier had advised her not to carry a picture of her daughter with her, we found that she did not heed the advice.
When the Gestapo found out, they threatened to force her daughter into prostitution if she did not speak. In Gill's words, the photographs of the mother were a necessary, yet deadly rebellion in a resistance movement with no way out.
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