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Welcome to the projection Booth. I'm your host, Mike White, Jenny once again as MS. Sam Degan.
Hello.
Also back in the booth is mister Andrew Leevold.
I'm really happy to be here, thank you.
We conclude our house August with a look at Jean Pierre Melville's Army of Shadows, ostensibly a about the French resistance in World War Two. The film stars Lino Ventura as Philippe Xerbier, one of four main resistance fighters we meet as we travel through the underworld, striking out at the German occupiers and those loyal to the Vshi government. We will be spoiling the film and World War Two as we go along. So if you don't want anything ruined, and if you don't like it when Nazis are called
bad people, then this podcast isn't for you. This may be one of those though, where it's better to hear the podcast before actually watching the film. It might help. So, Sam, when was the first time you saw Army of Shadows? And what did you think?
I want to say this was the film that really got me into Melville, So probably fifteen twenty years ago at this point, and I mean, I just instantly fell in love with it. It was so much darker than I think I was expecting, or than I think I was used to because a lot of World War Two films do kind of feel like propaganda, and there's some of that going on here, which I'm sure we'll talk about, but it's just so grim.
Andrew, how about yourself?
Pretty much the same as Sam, I think fifteen or twenty years ago, during the early phase of the Melville obsession. I can't remember what order I saw the three films, you know, like Army of Shadows and the two Elaine Delan films on either side. But for me, the film definitely solidified the fact that I was a now a committed Melville file and there was certainly no going back. There was certainly no resistance from my part.
This was a new one for me. Of all the Melvilles that I've seen, I have not seen Army of Shadows, so I don't know what it was. I've watched it a few times now, but the very first time I watched it, I just said, I don't think I'm going to understand too much of this film. I'm just going to let it wash over me and then I'll think about it later, maybe about it, and then I'll come back to it. But I'm just going to enjoy this
experience of being in this world. I mean enjoy quote unquote because it's so dire and it's that world, I mean, the physical world of it. I think we said this before we even started recording, just that muted tone that he's going for. I mean we saw that a little bit in the circle rouge and then we're for sure going to see that in Unfleek, and it's just, Yeah, the look of this movie is just so gorgeous.
Between like how beautiful it looks and how beautiful the performances are, I feel like there is kind of this dissonance where you enjoy it and like you said, you kind of let the world of the film wash over you. But at the same time, it's it's such an unpleasant experience because it just like every scene is grim.
The silence is in the film, you know, there's so much more deafening than dialogue and so much more oppressive than words that you do get the most uncomfortable breaks in dialogue where you know something terrible is bound to happen and your your mind is just kind of like filling in the blanks, and then what happens is just so much more grim. So that's fun.
This whole movie seems to rely on that as far as the we're going to show you some things, we're not going to show you other things. There are so many times where, like even one of the major sequences of the film is when they're trying to break somebody out of a hospital or get somebody out of a hospital and they are all in German uniforms, and at one point, this guy I think the Bison comes in
where the buffalo depends on which subtitles you read. He comes in and Simon Signori is there and as Matilda, and she's like, where'd you get the uniforms? Say that's better. I don't tell you, okay, I mean that whole how did you get the uniforms? Could have been an adventure unto itself, or there's one character where you see him he's like, oh, yeah, I think I'd be interested in this whole resistance thing, and then two scenes later it's oh,
this guy's been on tons of missions. He's good to go, and we don't see any of those missions in between.
And also Stani, I think it's one of those rare films that if you played it backwards it would still have an unhappy ending.
Well, I guess the ending would be Germans marching out of Paris because of that amazing opening shot of the Germans marching into Oh my gosh, right by the Umpty ly say the Arcta trionf having that in the background, and then to have that in the background to your point of the very final shot the Arcta trielphis in there.
I know it's a beautiful book ending of the film, but you can see it through the windshields of their citrone, we assume, and it's sort of like framed within this almost like this kind of oh, what are the vehicles that you use in funerals?
A hearse?
Hearse? That car is almost like a hearse because you've just found out that all four people in that car are more or less being driven to their deaths.
It's one of those films that would maybe be a good introduction to the actual historical events, like if you're watching it as a younger person and maybe you don't know as much about the French occupation, because I think he is able to use his genius as a director who constructs really intricate, well made thrillers into this world that feels so personal and that it's like, it's fun to think about something like this World War two resistance
kind of historical film being so deeply personal for a director, but like it clearly is so personal, and both from the adaptation of the book to just the different scenes, it's like you get the sense that he lived it in a way that I think the majority of World War Two films or war films period don't have this kind of quality to them.
Yeah, but he's also reconstructed his memories of World War Two, and he's put them through a kind of film nerds siev, you know, so that it's all become kind of mashed up into a big pink paste, and then he's rearranged it according to pulp fiction or genre cinema principles and quite clearly cinematic ideas that would have been prevalent in the thirty and forties when he was a young man that he is now kind of reconstructing as a as an elder of French cinema.
Which is crazy to think that when this came out in France, now we think about it as such a classic, but when it came out people hated it, partly because the younger generation, who would all become part of the French New Wave, really pointed out that this was like an older model of filmmaking and therefore not in vogue
and not worthy of attention. And that combined with the fact that he it's such a strange film because it's like he paints the resistance fighters individually as fundamentally heroic, and so the issue of releasing a film in the late sixties that glorified the resistance and made it seem like the majority of French citizens supported the resistance, which was not at all true. It's like a film that came at the wrong time and didn't get appreciated basically
for decades. But it's even with those elements. I don't get how any of those kyaucinema writers could have watched this and thought it was a bad film, like just an insane tea.
I suspect that they didn't even bother to watch it. I think they just saw the subject matter French resistance during World War Two and wrote it off after May sixty eight as old fashioned, as reactionary. And so he became redundant almost as a filmmaker overnight because his concern was with you the nineteen forties, and therefore it just wasn't cool anymore.
Yeah, but it makes you want to like bend them over your knee and give them, give them a spanking.
They didn't see the film because the film is anything but reactionary.
They just wanted to tear down the old you know. Yeah, And then with like you said with May sixty eight and then the glorification of Degaull and this, you know, the big moment where Degaul gives one of the characters a ribbon. All right, this is great, but by that point, yeah, completely out of fashion, Like, don't glorify to Gaul at that point that had.
Been going on for a while. But if you actually watched this in the late sixties, which you know, I
was not alive for that. But I feel like you can also, even though this was not intentional on Melville's part, I think you can still draw parallels between this film and something like the Algerian War and this sense of needing to resist despite the inevitability of things like torture and death and possible defeed, and this idea of there being this overwhelming enemy that you don't necessarily know that you can overcome, but you're fighting anyway. So I yeah,
I don't know. I think Andrew must be right. And they probably didn't see it or went into it determined to hate it.
Yeah, and tear him down. I believe. The other criticism leveled at the film at the time was that he was trying to make resistance fighters seem like gangsters, and they were like the characters that would appear in some of his earlier policia films. And I mean that's a really facile kind of argument as well, because these stories exist outside of their generic structures. I mean, you've got here resistance fighters that are kind of like gangster figures
in other Melville films. You've got the Gestapo who may as well be the cops or lef Flick, you know what I mean. And really, those those genres are just vehicles for Melville to tell his stories, to tell the those elements of tales that he himself fetishizes, which is, you know, stories of loyalty, deceit, betrayal and other big
picture terms like that. And you can only really get that level of intensity within a genre such as, you know, a film about the French resistance or about the criminal underworld. So really it was just it was convenient that he was able to draw on his own past, his own sets of personal fetishes, to be able to tell a story of the resistance using these kind of underworld figures.
But I do think it's appropriate because one of the criticisms at the time, and I think even into the seventies was the way that this as I think, I said, the way that this makes it seem like most French citizens were sympathetic to the resistance and participated in it, even in some kind of soft way, which as we know, is absolutely not true. But I don't know. I just I think this idea that painting resistance fighters as criminals and as gangsters, I think it's true to life, because
occupations forced people into criminal activity. Like once you have something like a military occupying force, a colonial occupying force that creates a whole set of laws about what citizens can and cannot do, you drive people to crime and violence.
And with the case of the French resistance, I think the people who actually got involved, I mean, as the film point out, you have once you sign up for something like that, I think they had a six month life expectancy, so you're basically signing yourself up for a death sentence, and that takes a particular type of person.
And it's also, as the film I think really points out, the people who excel the most in the resistance and were able to do the most effective work were people who didn't have qualms about violence, who were able to murder people, or maybe they had military experience from the First World War that gave them that particular skill set. But you also have people who were actually engaged in
criminal activity signing up. So it's like that kind of criticism that you know, he's taking these sort of revered figures of the war and turning them into gangsters. It's like they were gangsters. They're blowing up cars and trains and doing whatever they had to do.
They described the Felix as a terrorist when they tried to pick him up from the hospital, and all right, yeah, I guess that would be how they'd be painted as not resistance fighters but terrorists by the system.
But also I think it's important to point out not just by the Nazi occupying force, but also by a
lot of the French population who were comfortable. It's like, as long as you weren't Jewish or Communist or overtly outspoken, the Nazis treated the French very differently from any other country they occupied, and I think that kind of explains why so many average French citizens were quick to turn a blind eye, because for the most part they were comfortable, which I think he does sort of get at a little bit with the film.
Oh, I would also explain why Marine Lepine had such a massive swing towards her basically National Front party in the recent French elections, because once you go outside of the cities in France and you go into rural France, they're deeply conservative, deeply racist, deeply fearful of communism and
other races. And so I think that decent percentage of the population would have seen the Nazis as a kind of cleansing agent of all of these decadent and disreputable influences on France back in the thirties and forties.
Well, and also a cleansing influence that would remove quote unquote foreigners from the country. And yeah, it's I think there are definitely some parallels to Marine La penn But it's also kind of heartbreaking when you think about someone like Melville, who would have been seen as an outsider because he was Jewish, and the fact that so many French Jews whose families had lived there for centuries, like
they were French people, they weren't outsiders. But that conservative contingent, I think is just determined to have that kind of make France great great again mentality.
Well, it's interesting because you're talking about the how people are playing along with these guys. And really, when I think about it, there's two regular citizens that they bump into that to your point, they help out. I mean, Serge Reggiani shows up. I mean that whole scene at the barber shop I think is fantastic, the whole is he going to turn me in? Is he not going to? He's got that kind of vchy poster on the wall, and you know, but then he ends up giving him
the coat. And then that woman at the train station when she's going along with a Gen Francois, and then the cops. The cops at the train station, I think they're looking for stuff they can steal out of these suitcases more than anything, and what the radios just don't
really interest them. And then there's the cops that are in the van with JBA at the beginning and what they were talking about how great that prison camp is because they built it for the Germans or no that, yeah, they built it for the Germans, so it's going to be really comfy and everything. And he says something about like we built it during the Phony War. Is that a World War One reference?
I think it's a reference to the years before world War Two actually kicked.
Off before the Vishi government took over and said, you know, welcome.
There's this period in the very beginning of World War Two where the Nazis invade Austria and then they invade Czechoslovakia and that I think that's the period where World War Two had actually begun but it didn't impact France at all yet, but they set everything up assuming that battle would break out. And because like for anyone who doesn't know this history, I think it's confusing because it's easy to assume that everyone was immediately against Hitler, which is,
you know, not true. Unfortunately, like you said, we will be spoiling World War Two in this episode. But the fact that the French government kind of went back and forth like yes, we have to defend our borders, but also they're not really going to attack us. How bad can it be? And so I think that period in nineteen thirty nine is the is what's referred to as the phony War. Do you think that you need an understanding of World War Two in France to really get
this film, because I don't entirely. I think the way that he structures it, like Andrew has been pointing out like it's a gangster movie. It's like he does so much work building this world that I think you can go into the film knowing French people versus Nazis and you don't need to know too many other details.
Well, it was for a French audience in nineteen sixty nine, you know, and most of the people who would have been watching the film would have lived through it, so they don't need context. I mean, you know, Usp Sucker is now more than fifty years after the release of the film, and I mean this film came out before even I was born. I'm feeling pretty damn old right now. The fact that there was a collaborative government, you know,
the Vichy puppet government in France at the time. If you don't know that that was going on, this film might be a little confusing. It's like, who are the bad guys here? You know, I thought the French were with us man, but no. It's the great stain on the French soul that a great percentage and probably more, as Melville would have pointed out, more people siding with
the Germans than with the resistance. You know, that's the great, the great shame of the country that so many of the population went, you know, who cares about the Jews.
In the three decades following World War Two, no one talked about that. There's this immediate glorification of the resistance that happens basically in nineteen forty five on where there is this kind of myth that the government and French culture and French citizens build around this idea that everyone participated in the resistance. You know, the whole country was against the Nazis the whole time.
Oh yeah, if you were in the Viishi government, you had a gun pointed directly at your forehead, was the idea?
Oh yes, So much so that the stuff has become tropes for movies. I mean, as they're introducing La Masque and Le Bisson, I'm thinking of you know, let chocolate Moose from Top Secret, you know, just like resistance films became a subgenre of movie.
So I think there's a real lost opportunity here. I reckon Phelipe Jerbier, he should have had a cool nickname like Legerbille. That would have been really boss.
That would have been much more like heist movie appropriate. But this comes at an interesting time because, as I said earlier, it like French resistance movies became, like you said, such a mainstream, popular subgenre, but they feel like these really kind of stripped down adventure films that are propaganda for how great French people are. So it's like, you have this movie come out in the late sixties that it doesn't say anything bad about the resistance fighters other
than the moral lengths they're willing to go to. But then right after this you have The Sorrow and the Pity come out, the great Off Fuels film, and The Sorrow and the Pity is basically like fuck everyone France did not did not support the resistance, and it's just like interesting to see them come back to back and the scandals that they both caused in very different ways. But people don't like being reminded that their shills for Nazis.
I can't understand why.
Well, maybe don't side with them in the first place.
Maybe maybe I mean the whole idea of this being a gangster film, Ian I consider, yes, this does feel like a gangster film. I know a lot of people rail against that, like no, no, no, it's not a gangster film, but yeah, it totally feels like it. And there are so many moments where it's a heist. But Melville handles heists and gangster films like no one else. So the idea of building tension. There's the whole thing of you know, helping Serbia escape, you know, that's an
amazing scene, and it's basically a heist. Or trying to get Felix out of the hospital. That's basically a heist when you think about it. Even going back to the scene in the I guess the Nazis took over these grand hotels, right, and so the scene in the hotel with the two men with Serbia and the other guy that he gets sat down next to, the tension in
that scene before they escape is just incredible. The editing is great, just looking at these guys faces and just wondering when is this going to happen, and then when it does, it just is crazy. And then I also, speaking of things that are left off screen, you don't know what happens to the other guy. You hear the the machine guns. I'm thinking things aren't good for him, But I love that you don't know what happens to him.
He doesn't come back later in the film. You don't get these traditional moments of you know, oh, what happened to this person or this thing happened off screen? I need to see it. No, just leave it up to Melville to show the important parts.
And talk about it. Reaction shots as well, Like, you know, you have your two execution scenes in the film, and they more or less bookend the action as well. And that initial scene where the collaborator is taken to a room and they're trying to shoot. They're trying to shoot the guy, but then they realize that the walls are paper thin and they might wake up the children next door. So they're arguing, you know, how are they going to kill him quietly? And they end up using a towel.
But that whole execution scene is done almost entirely from reaction shots, and you could tell they're not having a good time. Oh man, Like every one of those close ups of those reaction shots are post gods of pain and regret and revulsion and moral turpitude.
It's I think one of the most affecting death scenes in any film, and it's brutal to watch. Like, no matter how many times I've seen this, that scene is just brutal to watch. And I have to wonder if that was influenced by Fritzlan's Hangman Also Die, which has kind of a similar scene in it where for anyone who doesn't know that film because it is a more
obscure long movie, it's another resistance film. Check Resistance. And there's similarly a scene where a resistance fighter and a Nazi get into a fight and they're trying to keep it quiet so as not to draw the attention of other police or Nazis. And it's a similar moment where there's this just like harrowing long shot where the way that the resistance fighter has to kill the Nazis by
strangling them to death, and it's like long. Lets you know that like strangling someone is not quick, It takes a while, much like they do in an Army of Shadows. But the comparison always made me wonder if maybe that's what Melville was referencing a little bit, though I'm sure he also probably either lived through something like this or heard stories about it.
It's all about the details as well. I mean, you can see, you can taste the fear on the guy who is blindfolded and then strapped into a chair and is waiting to die, and I mean all those people in the film. I mean, no one gets out alive. Everyone is essentially facing their own death, which is what Lindsay Anderson when talking about this film described as the essence of tragedy. You know that this is all about
people facing their imminent death. And I think that the details of that scene leading up to that character's death are absolutely, like you said before, Sam, absolutely harrowing. Just those little the whimpers, you know, the cries of you know, the how of someone who knows that they're about to die. That stuff's chilling. Melville is able to put that into a movie because he knows that sound.
And how smart does it to have that take place in the chair, which then you get that chair repeating. You know, that's one of the most famous images from the movie, is this back of the chair with a victim in there. And you get that scene framing, you know, twice with those guys, and then you have this chair here. Are they any better than what the Nazis are doing?
They're taking turns to be the tormentor and the tormented.
That's part of what makes it feel so tragic. It's not just that they're facing their deaths. It's that I Thinkville makes it much less black and white than previous French made resistance films, which really kind of polarize things.
So on one hand, you have these super heroic resistance fighters and the only people that they're really ever seen to be killing are actual Nazis, Whereas in this film he gives you the sense basically from early on that the world is full of gray area, and in order to be an effective resistance fighter, you're not just killing Nazis, but you also have to be willing to kill French people who are collaborating, even if they're collaborating under duress.
It's just I keep saying this, but it's brutal the way that the moral choices.
Yeah, but also one of those moral choices is to choose to kill one of you're in a circle, and that comes at the end of the film with the execution Matild.
That is one of the ultimate tragic scenes again in cinema, because she's been such a powerhouse throughout the film and Simone Signori, you know, one of the greatest actors of all time, got to be said, is so incredible in the role. But the way that it sets up, it's almost when she gives them when she's imprisoned, and she has to give them names in order to protect her
teenage daughter. It's like she knows that's a death sentence, but she would rather be killed by other resistance fighters who will at least be merciful, rather than being tortured to death by the Gestapo who will then also kill her teenage daughter. It's just it's we're so removed from having to make choices like that, although watching this film now, with everything going on in Palestine, it's just like the cycle never ends. Not not to make this a more depressing conversation.
Two of the people that we see murdered are the initial guy, the young guy at that house, and then Simon Signur at the end. And for me, one of the biggest tragedies is that they think that Jean Francois did something bad, rather than knowing that he turned himself in in order to try to comfort Felix and then eventually give felixes. As far as I understand the scene, give Felix his cyanide pill so that Felix can be
put out of his misery. Jean Francois just is taking this major bullet for his friend, his comrade, and I just I think that's that's wonderful. And the other tragedy, Yeah, the rest.
Of the comrades will never know that he died in an anonymous death at the hands of the.
Guestar par No, they won't. They'll curse his name, and his brother won't know this whole thing, that his brother is basically one of the leaders of these cells send Luke.
Yeah.
And that wonderful scene of them eating together, the two brothers together in that little tiny it's like a house within a house.
It's like your little figaboos.
I love that. I love that this is how they maintain their heat because they don't have any coal to burn. I thought. I love that. I love that whole idea of them being so close together in that little tiny room, but not knowing that either one is working for the resistance now and they'll never know that.
That's another element that really emphasizes the tragedy in this. Like so often in classical tragedy things, something that moves the plot forward is this failure to communicate basic things that would resolve everything. And it's not necessarily here that it would resolve everything, but the secrecy required and the fact that people can't have really any kind of emotional intimacy at all without putting someone directly at risk of
death or torture or imprisonment. It's like, how do you continues society in this type of situation where everything is compromised and everything is kind of put on pause. The way that people know how to relate to each other. It's he's really great. I think it depicting that kind of tragedy of communication and tragedy of just like human drama. It's not just that you have to make these moral choices to commit violence or not, but also that you have to kind of be in this little bubble that
no one else can touch. It's such a lonely film and no.
Room for sentiment or love of any kind. You know, when Matil brings out the photograph of her daughter, you know that that's going to be her weak spot. Jerbier knows that it will probably bring her down. He says, get rid of the photo now, probably knowing that she won't out of sentiments, you know, out of love and loyalty, and it ends up being the thing that sends it to her execution.
After they rescue Gerbier, and there's that little moment in the back of the car where she grabs his hand. Oh, so wonderful, just that little bit of human contact. Just it's so great. His whole thing too, where he's angry that he's been rescued. He did not want to run from the Nazis, you know, being held in that prison, and that he's so angry, I think at himself, angry at them for rescuing him. He's just had it at that point. And I don't think that has to do
with him not getting a cigarette. That whole sequence is fucking amazing, where we've got Yourbia with this pack of cigarettes, and rather than take one himself, he passes it to the next prisoner. And I just love that editing pattern of just moving from one person to the next, and then you go back when they get the lighter. And then after they come all the way around to your
BA again where he doesn't have his cigarettes. The guy previous to him had the last one, and then you do those little push ins on all of those guys as they're lighting their cigarettes, and you just know these all these guys are doomed.
Yeah.
Absolutely, That's where Melville is best able to convey love and affection is in these silent gestures of sacrifice and loyalty, whether it's you know, Jean Francois really taking a bullet to give him that cyanide capsule, or these little moments
with the cigarettes. It's it just I think he's unable to convey regular sentiment in any of his movies in a way that feels like warm and fuzzy and sort of typical mainstream cinema, but he so often does it, especially showing these sort of bonds of loyalty between men through moments of sacrifice, which I think is especially why it's unusual in his films have a character like Matilda at all. I mean, one of the biggest criticisms lobbed against him as a director is that he can't do
women characters. He so infrequently has them in major roles in his crime films, But here, I think she's such an important balance to everything that's going on that, like, I can't imagine the film without her character and the way that she represents that kind of inability to stop being human. It's like she loves her daughter.
I think you could argue that she is the soul of the movie. Certainly, the moral backbone of the film and that every everyone else kind of is able to weave a sort of sinewy dance around a moral compass, but she is the moral compass.
I didn't look at the time code when this happens, but it takes a long time for her to come into the story, like we are introduced to so many things before we're introduced to her. And I just really appreciate what Melville was doing when it came to the structure of this, because we should probably say that the Cassell book also author of Belle deo Joure, another film
that we've talked about on here. I mean, it's similar in that there's a lot of vignettes and just kind of fragments of stories and little bits and pieces of things, because that's really what Melville was doing with this. I mean, it is a lot of vignettes, but each one feels like it leads to the next one. It doesn't feel like it's just random scene. It's like, oh, here's a
day in life of a resistance fighter. It feels like everything adds to the next thing, and that he's able to inform it to your point from earlier, He's able to inform it with his own life that when he's reading this Cassell book, he's basically, oh, yeah, I knew that guy. Oh I've had a beer with that, you know, just was able to put his own life into this.
Like you said, this is definitely, I think one of his most personal films, and this is the one where you get the closest to kind of cracking that nut of that. Even though there have been now I think at least read documentaries about Melville, he still seems so inscrutable so often.
Yeah, well, this film is certainly not bogged down by facts of any kind.
No, no, don't let those get in the way.
It's the ultimate fictional docudrama, really, if you break break it down that way.
It's also such an interesting companion piece. So this comes
pretty late in his career. It's his I think he only made two films after this, and it very much feels like the work of a mature director, Like I can't imagine someone young making this film, like either the content or the formula of it based, but he didn't make like I think it would be easy to see him as someone who was so invested in the war and that time in his life that maybe he would just make a bunch of World War two films, but the fact that they really only bookend his career with
the exception of Leon Moran, which is sort of in the middle. This is the total opposite film of Las Sillons de la Maire, which was his first film and is also a World War two drama about this father and daughter whose house in the French countryside is requisitioned and this young Nazi officer comes to live with them and they don't fucking talk to him for the entire movie.
But it's it's almost like this quiet, tragic chamber drama that's played out in these monologues where he talks to the family every night, even though they don't want to talk to him, And this is the total opposite film of that, But they both ill personal in such different ways that it's like, I don't know, it makes me wish that he could have made twice as many films because he's just such a genius.
Well, there's what around twenty years between those two films between In Silence of the c.
And exactly twenty years. One is nineteen forty nine, one is nineteen sixty nine.
Yeah, so he's had twenty years to brood about things and to become increasingly jaded and cynical and world we weary and basically a cranky old Frenchman who's you know, railing against not just a classical cinema but also these you know, new wave upstarts. A guy who is independent of everyone, you know, an independent filmmaker who just wants to be left alone to make the films he wants to make, which is why I love Melville. I mean, he's basically me.
I mean, his his ethos very punk in a lot of ways.
Yeah, and so completely idiosyncratic in the way that he pieces together these films from fragments of memories of his own life but also of the movies that he was
watching when he was a young man. And that relationship to cinema is so beautifully encapsulated in that moment where he's in London and he sees the billboard for Gone with the Wind behind him on the Marquee on a theater in London, and he says, when we see this in Paris, we know that we'll be free, or something like that, And so he is still able to relate a moment like that back to cinema, which I think is emblematic of his relationship with his chosen art form, and I.
Think it also is what makes someone like you know, all three of us probably feel a very special connection to him, because he's not just a director making movies. He's someone whose entire life and many life experiences are framed in relation to things he watched and movies that gave him a particular feeling. Like I think a lot of his love of cinema helped him process things like war trauma, which is why he's so drawn to these
more violent subgenres. And to have a director like that who's so outside of the system, and I think if you're not as familiar with his work, it might not immediately be obvious that he pretty much told mainstream French cinema to fuck off by going outside of it entirely starting his own studio, Like who does that in the immediate years after the war ended in the rubble of Paris, Yes, in the rubble of Paris and combining elements from American films in a way that nobody else in France was
doing at the time, which is why I think it's especially rude to have all these young upstarts treat him like he's one of those cinema of quality directors, like none of them would have had careers without him.
But also remember where he was seeing all of these formative film experiences, and that was when he was in London during World War Two. He wouldn't have had access to all of those hard boiled American film noirs or pre pre noirs of the nineteen thirties if it wasn't for the fact that he was stationed in London during World War Two on behalf of the Resistance. So that period of forty two to forty four is basically shaping
his movie taste. In that very same period that he's depicting an army of shadows with that billboard on the theater behind him in London, So I thought that was kind of neat too, and it's almost like a nod to his exponential growth is a cinophile thanks.
To the war, which is a wild thing to fold into a movie like this, or even to just have subtle references to it, because I think it does remind you that even though the war was going on and it went on for over six years, for a lot of people, especially in Central Europe, it went on even longer than that, but it kind of gives you the idea that life continues on even if you're fighting with the Free French Army, or even if you're in the
resistance and finding those moments to connect with something beautiful like cinema. It's what keeps a lot of people going or dance.
That whole scene with the Benny Goodman song, I mean he goes in and gets see the people kissing and dancing, and then the way that the camera shakes, and then you know the dust coming down from the ceiling, and.
They keep on dancing. They keep on dancing, and you know that they ain't going to be dancing for too much longer. You know the lights are going to go out and they're going to be making little war babies.
I mean, France has survived somehow, right.
France.
All right, let's go ahead and take a break and play an interview with Jeanette Vincendu, author of Jean Pierre Melville and American in Paris. Right after these brief messages.
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Next Time, I wanted to compliment you on your audio commentary for Army of Shadows. I thought it was fantastic and just so packed with information and so well timed with the action of the actual movie itself. Thank you so much for doing that well.
Thank you, And in fact, to tell you the truth, I haven't listened to it again, so I hope I'm
not going to contradict myself. But when I did the a number of those Melville commentaries, it's such an enormous amount of work that now when people ask me, I'm very tempted to say no, because precisely because I always do it in such a way that it's timed exactly, you know, so that I've seen so many commentaries where just people just say, oh, you know, he's now he's entering the room, and you think, yes, okay, I can
see that. So I was trying to and it's very interesting exercise because in some cases you have a lot of things happening, you know, in a few seconds, and it's very hard to cover everything. And in other times, obviously you have you know, long moments, so then you know, I use those for giving historical background for example, or details about the reception of the film or something too.
So that is not just simply duplicating what people can see, you know, unless you're actually saying something about, you know, the way they come into the room or something. So but thank you very much, And as I say, I hope I'm not going to contradict myself. Although of course, seeing it again quite a few years after I worked on this book, it's now I was quite shocked to seece twenty years more than that year since I wrote
this book. So it's obviously I've seen the film in the meantime, but it's you know, not to work on. So it's kind of seeing it again, you know, you you know, you move on, and obviously I think a lot of the things I you know, I reread my chapter in the book and you know, agreed with myself more or less, but I yeah, it's you know, something suddenly you perceive, you know, slightly differently.
You've done so much research, or you probably had to do so much research just on the French resistance movement, because obviously we're too young to have lived through all of these things. How much is that taught when it comes to being in school even or is it just kind of glossed over?
Well, it really depends on your age, and and yes, that's right. I was born after the war, and throughout my childhood and at school it wasn't talked about very much. And I also noticed that when I was young, people around me never talked about it. And as you know, there was a kind of explosion after May sixty eight, roughly just after the moment when La Medison was made, people started talking much more about what had happened in
the war, and especially the less glawous aspects. Because straight after the war there's a moment when, of course there's a lot of writing and a few films about the glories of the resistance, and then it's sort of it doesn't disappear that, you know, a number of films are made that refer to it, but it's quite muted. And I think that corresponds to the fact that in society
in general. People just didn't want to know. And when in the I was very struck in the early seventies, for example, and you know, I was a student and I was no longer at school, and all these great works like Robert Paxton's book in particular about VC France came out and people started talking about the occupation. And my parents, for example, who they lived in farms in the west of France when they were young, and suddenly there was talking about or you know, this farmer, everybody
knew that he gave food to the Germans. He's sold on the black market. This one everybody knew. They were resistors. And I said, well, you never talked about that before, and they said no, you know, just nobody was interested. They didn't want to They wanted to forget. I think there's also this kind of oblivion. Often his criticize people saying, well, you know, French people did want to come to terms
with it, and there is some truth in that. I also think that there's a kind of natural phenomenon of wanting to move on and forget those ghastly four years of the German occupation for French people, and people in my family were like very typical that they were in occupied region and yes, they said, you know, there were everybody was divided. So nah, I think it's very different.
And for example, my father when he passed away recently, but when he was in his seventies, he would go around schools and talk to children, I mean with other former people, and I mean he was very young during
the war. He was I think, you know it just joined at the end of the war and he was in the Air Force, but he would go round to talk to school children in the nineteen eighties, nineteen nineties and so on, and you know, so that's that's the kind of what's happened at a larger scale in the country. So as a child, no, it wasn't taught. Now it's very different and there's much more awareness of it.
It feels to me as an outsider that perceptions of that whole period change over the years. Things like Sarah and the Pity really kind of recast everything, and just the pendulum swings back and forth when it comes to impressions of that era.
You're right, And of course you mentioned The Store and the Pity, which is clearly a film which talks about how the majority of people were not in the resistance, nor were they out and out collaborators, but they were what was called atonics. They were just living and waiting for things to come to an end and just living every day life. And of course in countries that were not occupied, for example in the UK, there's often a
very critical attitude towards that. But I think on a day to day basis, it's very difficult to decide what is resistance, what these collaborations in some cases. I think another aspect that has changed enormously is the perception of the Holocaust, because when you see the Soul in the Pity,
they're talking about the German occupation of France. But still the question of anti Semitism, the Vichy government attitude towards the Jews and its collusion with the Germans in sending people to the count all that is still very much kept on the cover, and you have to wait until you get to films like Showa you know later where sort of as it were, the last taboo becomes much
more talked about. So it's a very long process and it's taken decades, but it is very striking in France is that wherever you look, there's always that sense of division, that some people were denouncing the Jews to the police, others were saving them. Some people resisted and some people didn't. There's you know, it's very easy to judge from outside. I think one thing, but of course I would have been on this side of that side. I think experience
shows that it's always much more muddled and complicated. But of course this is not what you see in a film like Army in Shadows, which takes a very definitive view of the period and view that I think it's very interesting and very historically located as well.
Well.
It must have been a lot for you to look at Cassell's book and see how it was changed by Melville, and then compare that even to kind of the historical record, to weide your way through all of these different impressions of the actual time period.
Yes, I mean sure, the F. K. Cell's book is very interesting because it's more it really is a collection of anecdotes that are very loosely put together, and Melville turned it into a tighter narrative with the hero RBA sort of running through all the anecdotes. And that being said, I was very interested watching the film again last week that I suddenly was more aware of this kind of episodic nature. There's a kind of epic quality to the film and the sense of heroism and the sense of purpose.
At the same time, it's all very fragmented and quite ambivalent, and I think that comes partly from the Caselle book. But at the same time, what Kesel and Melville shared was of course kind of reverence for the Resistance, and of course Ksell's book was written much earlier, and I think was part of this kind of the idea, sort of very much based on the personal experience for people telling their story. And Melville, when he made the film, was very keen on authenticity. Decided that, you know, we
must tell it how it was. And according to Melville in interviews, every anecdote in the film, every episode, sometimes quite difficult to believe that such a thing actually took place, and yet he says everything was absolutely genuine. It happened
to one person. Of course, it didn't happen to the same person as you see in the film, but nevertheless, it's it's very much part I think of that search for authenticity, for recreating the experience of the resistance and the German occupation, Army in the Shadow was Melvie's third film about the war, because he made Lucie lance de la Maire soon after the war, which is based also on the book by a great figure of the resistance, Verco, and then in the sixty early sixties he made Leon
moreen Prette, which is based on a book by Betris Beck, which is also an autobiographical story. So it's interesting that all three films that Melville made about the resistance, which he himself had been part of, were based on other people's views, but people who belong to the resistance and
whose heroism and whose personal views cannot be doubted. So I think that's the first thing that's important, is this sense of genuine ness of authenticity, that which was very important to Melville at the time when he made the film sixty nine.
It's interesting, though, that you do point out that all of the protagonists are all older people rather than possibly what they would have been in that time period. It's almost like taking a look at it from nineteen sixty nine perspective.
Absolutely, when one looks at the earlier films about the Resistance that were made in the immediate period, there's often the figure of the resistance is a very young man in a leather jacket performing kind of great feat of action. And by the time of La Medism of Army Shadows in nineteen sixty nine, yes, these are older men. Certainly
the hero Gerbier, who is played by Leno Ventures. One guess the sense that these are the heroes of the Resistants who lived when they were young and twenty five years later are still there to kind of testify for it. And the same thing with Lukexardi, the character played by Paul Maurice, who is the head of the whole network that we see, and in fact we also see in the film a character called Colonel Passi, which was his resistance name, who plays himself, who had been in London
with genealder Gold during the war. And one sees the film nineteen sixty nine and we see this man, we realize he would have been a very young man in twenty five years earlier, because he doesn't look that old. So that's why it's the sense of these people reflecting like Melville himself. And when the film came out in nineteen sixty nine was just after Geneval de Gold had
left power. He'd been pushed at by a referendum after ME sixty eight event, And of course the goal is the great hero of the resistance, and the great hero has portrayed also in the film. And when the film came out, a lot of people criticized Melville for having made a goalist film, And to me, that is a misreading. And I think it's easy, of course for us to see that now, because it is a film to the glory of the resistance and the glory of Genehalde Gold.
It's also extremely ambivalent. It's an extremely dark film. It's very pessimistic. Everybody dies at the end that it's almost like all this heroic action was for nothing. So it's and that, of course what makes the film so rich
and interesting. But I think it probably I wouldn't blame too much people at the time for not perceiving it, because at the moment when de gaul had gone, France had been through the Mesic th eighty event, everything was about youth and change, and suddenly there was this monument to the great glory of the of the resistance. But when one looks closely at the film, one sees that it's a very dark film. It's almost morbid it's it's extremely dark, and of course it's not unlike other films
by Melville, including his gangster films. But so one has to temper the view that this is a film to the glory of the Resistance. It's to its glory, but also there is a sadness about it. It's a tribute and yet also a lament for it.
I think it's not a sexy film. It's not splashes of color. I mean, it's so cold. I love how Melville was making those black and white films and color and just gives you that He keeps you at arm's length with so much of it.
Yes, it's a film where it's almost like permanent winter. We begin the film with our two beginnings. The first one is German soldiers marching down the chans Lys with in the background very early in the morning when it was shot, so the light is quite a sort of blue gray. And then we move on to an even darker scene with somebody lenovent rade hero being taken away to camp and the policeman gendarme driving the vans stop
at the farm and they step in the mud. The first thing, the driver comes out of the van and steps in the mud, it's raining, it's dark, and this is almost the way that we're going to have all the way through the film. So it's like, yes, it's it's dark in winter, it's often at night or as well, and it seems to rain and be cold all the time.
I think when you say it's not a sexy film, I don't know if you had that in mind as well, that of course it's a very masculine film, and and there's ontainly one female or one woman Mattile played by Simon Signor, And it's a film which sort of bizarre everything seemed to be sucked away from the film. Absolutely, so I think, yes, I would in a way, I would agree with you.
I know you talked about this on the commentary as well as your book. But what was the relationship like between Melville and Tenture at this time?
They had not got along and it's well this started in an earlier film that Melville made with which is Lusiamsuf, in which their relationship deteriorated because Melville was somebody's very demanding with his actors. Whatever feeling was between the two men, and Val is absolutely magnificent on screen, and he's somebody who you know, in a way stepped in the shoes
of Jean Gabbard in you know, in previous roles. And and his performance style is really what Melville is after, because it's a very minimalist, very sober performance, very interiorized. He almost leaves lets nothing out. And this kind of cold,
apparently emotionless performance is of course what he's after. So I think that in that respect, the Louvre's performance in Lamidis own it's on the par with Alan Delan in the Samurai with de Lanort again, or Ive Montan for example, in the Circle, the Red Circle, all this kind of very interiorized, internalized masculine performances where masculinity is defined not by spectacular action, but but this kind of the solidity of the presence. And and and I think Vaturra is
absolutely brilliant at the center of the film. So yes, he and the director didn't get on all that well, but for our benefit it doesn't matter, because on screen he gives kind of perfect performance.
All the performances are just so solid. But Signor, I really like her, and I believe that you said something that she's not on screen very much, but her presence just goes throughout so much of the film.
Yes, so Simon Signor is a wonderful choice for Matthilde as the only female presence. This is Simon Signore already aging as an aging woman and for most of the film, except there's a moment when she dresses up as a prostitute,
she's trying various disguises for a particular action. She's an actress who was very, very beautiful in her youth, and suddenly it quite quickly loves that beauty, and unlike most actresses, especially at the time, who would then disappear from the screen, Signor managed a really wonderful second career playing those figures.
As she does play mattive with a huge presence, and in a way I would say she echoes Lenoventire's performance because she is also an actress who is not particularly demonstrative with her gestures or facial expressions, but the strength of her face and her eyes is such that she imposes her personality the minute we see her on screen.
She is also when my favorite scene in the film, which is a very spectacular one, is the one where she and two of the men in the in her network try to retrieve Felix and not who's been arrested at the gest from the Gestapo compound where he's healthy after having been tortured, and the entire scene is played in silence, there's no dialogue. She's as a nurse, she's being driven by her friend who are two of her the members of the network who are disguised as German soldiers,
and she's disguised as a nurse. But the tension is of course extreme in that scene because of course with fear for them for to be discovered as French in German disguised. But also her presence I think is very central too, is central to the to the scene. I think she also brings signor she was too young during the war and was not particularly involved in the resistance herself. However, after the war with ve Montane, she as a couple that were very much involved in politics, in left wing politics.
So in a sense, although she doesn't bring her own experience in the resistance, she does bring a kind of moral conscience which is very powerful I think through that very minimalist performance.
He talked about how the film wasn't well perceived in France when it came out, but I'm curious how it was received in other countries, if you're aware of that.
Mervin in general is a filmmaker who was very, very popular in France in the sixties, and some of these films were exported, but critically speaking, his reputation suffered towards the second half of the sixties and later, as he was perceived as a commercial director and also a conservative director. And this film when it came out, was considered by most reviewers, certainly in France, as a goalies film, as a right wing film, as a film which was out
of step with the time. And I think that's the reputation in the film had, And it took several decades for Melvy's reputation to be reclaimed and for the brilliance of the films of the film, all his films to be recognized more widely. And then of course he became a figure of admiration by directors like Quentin Tarantino, John Wayne Hong Kong and had a much bigger international reach
than he did at the time. So I think it's the change in the reception of this film is more generally the change in Melvy's own reception from great success in the early part of the sixties, then the kind of waning and a lot of criticism for his politics which were perceived as conservative and gaullist at the time when this was no longer the majority of view, and then a sort of oblivion for a couple of decades until being reclaimed later on in the nineteen nineties and
then the twenty first century. So yes, And at the same time, I think it's because since the film was made, a lot has been written about films and the German occupation, and there's much more awareness of how it fits within this particular topic, which is one which at the time the film was made was not particularly discussed, but since then again has become a topic in it's own right.
So it's both it fits within the Melville story and it also fits within the story of the perception of the Second World War and the German occupation of France.
What's your opinion about the way that Cayu de Cinema and a reversed course and what was in ninety six when they re evaluated in Melville? Why was that?
To understand that is in a ways is to do with the history of Kyu Di Cinema and the way the journal has been through you know, ups and down
and a variety of views. So as you know, I'm sure that when the journal was created in nineteen fifties, for a while it was very much the center of the what was called the politic desoteur, the claiming of the director as the author of the film above all else, and and something which was then put in practice with the New way filmmakers, So the critics like Franco Trifo, Shure we got out becoming filmmakers, and Eric Romer and
so on. Then around sixty seven sixty eight, the Journal went through a kind of incredibly intent politicization and where films were only analyzed in relation to ideology. And this was the phase when they even had no illustrations because that was frivolous and anything to do with entertainment was of no interest. And then gradually esthetics came back as
a consideration of what films were about. And I think so you had to go through all these different phases for Melville to be reconsidered, because in the late nineteen fifties, for a while Melville was considered sort of part of the New Wave with Bubbla Flamburg and also then two men in Manhattan, and from the early sixties onwards, from Leon Moore and pret his second film about the war, he decided to make more mainstream films with stars, and he said he was fed up with making marginal films.
And then from that point on his film were very successful with the audience, and they employed stars like Jean Paul ben Mondeaux and Leno Venture, et cetera. And so at that point, the moment when Melville was particularly popular and making films with big stars like Alan Delan was the moment when Causima was very politicized. And so it's quite shocking when you look at the reviews of Melville
films in the late sixties. So even the review of Le Saint Murais, for example, which you know, too many people is his masterpiece, you know, together with m in the Shadows. Maybe. Then the review of the Samurai says, oh, well, you know, it's it's yet another thriller and there's a good scene in the metro and that's like three lines, okay.
So and then a film like Lami Deison was criticized for being too much in thrall to the Gold's ideology, when at that point the journal was absolutely completely, you know,
in the extreme left. So you know, it's where when the team of people in charge changed gradually, and when you reach the nineteen eighties and you see the cinema itself in France changes, There's a return to the studio and to big productions, and within cinefi journals there is a return to an attention to style, to miss ancene, and attention to the figure of the director and the themes that are repeated exactly as they did in early in the nineteen fifties. So in fact then one could
see why and then they looked different. People in Ki Cinema looked at Melvis film then said well, this is brilliant, you know, the which of course they are, so I think they're different people. They basically it's the same journal with the same name, but it's a totally different team. You know, when when you look in the fifties, in the sixties and then later you know there's complete change
of writers and a complete change of ideology. So there's that sense that because it's cage you see them out, it must be the same, but actually it's not.
Kind Of along those lines, we talk about how perceptions of films change over the years, and I'm curious if there are any Melville films that you have thought differently about as the years have gone on.
I haven't changed my mind massively about them, but looking for example, looking at Army in the Shadow more recently, when I was looking at Army in the Shadow, I was more aware of the episodic nature. Also when recently, a few years ago, I did some work on the Red Circle and the issue of masculinity, and it's something which I've continued to work and also working on the
stars in the films. Currently, I'm writing a book about a filmmaker called Claude Tola, who also was very mainstream and very controversial figure as a French cinema and in nineteen fifty three he made a film called Le bon Dieu San confession there isn't really an English title, which is partly about the German occupation of France, and there's a character in it which seems is actually in disguise where it is clearly a Jewish character, except it isn't said.
And when I was researching this film in the archives, I found a telegram that Jean Pierre Medril had written to the filmmaker Claude Talaha to criticize him violently for the representation of the Jewish character, and he says, this is nineteen fifty three, and mend says, how could you make such a film when six million people, six million Jewish people died in the Holocaust, And I'm really shocked. I like your work normally, but I'm very shocked by this.
And this was interesting moment for me because although Jean Pierre Melville was Jewish and his real name was Grumbach, but he took the name Melville or his admiration for the American writer, and in his work and also in the interviews that I've read about him, there's never really he doesn't seem to be interested in the issue. He never talks about it. There's not a lot in leon More and pred There's a little bit of discussion, very very muted, And so it was fascinating to see that
in private he was very much concerned with it. But he managed to make his films in such a way that this would not this would remain implicit rather than explicit. So watching his films now, I'm quite interested when they are mentioned of Jewishness, and this is something that I
might not have been looking for before. It's very muted, is very discreete in Army in the Shadow at the beginning when the hero is in the camp and he's describing the the internment camp and he's saying, oh, there's absolutely everybody is represented here, you know, Gypsies, communists, resisters and so on, and he does, and there are Jewish people from every country. So it's a tiny mention. And now when one sees the film, one might say, well,
you know, he should have said more about it. Of course, it's easy to judge, you know, with hindsight. But I thought it was very to me, very interesting to have seen. And in fact, he sent that telegraph he sent to Claudo Talaha. He even says he wrote it at one in the morning, just after seeing the film. He was so enraged by this representation of the Jewish character in the film that he had to write it so I could measure the strength of his feeling there, because I
didn't know that. Unfortunately, when I wrote my book on Medal is something I discovered very recently.
I have to plead ignorance when it comes to the director who you're writing about. Now, are there any films of his you can recommend so I can become more familiar the best films.
His best films I think were made I started during the war, although he started in the twenties, but it's a very complicated story. You could start with Devil in the Flesh and the Diablocare with Gioffe Philippe and Mission Preel,
which is really wonderful film. And then to stay within the theme of the German occupation, one of the very best is film called La Traversee de Paris in English, I think it was called A Pig Across Paris, which is a sort of very dark comedy about the German occupation where you have Jean Gabin and Boville cross Paris at night with some meat in suitcases. So it's a
kind of very sardonic view of the period. So I think, yeah, I think if you start with those two, I mean I can send you an email with you know, Marcus filmography. He made a lot of films. I think these to me, these are probably the two best. I would start with those two and there they are both really good, and he made lots of others, But start with Diablo, the Devil in the Flesh and which has been remade since and it was based on the book and and La Tari.
I think it's a masterpiece and Diablo as well.
Yeah, fantastic. I look forward to watching those and eventually reading your book. Do you have a deadline that you're working towards.
Yes, after deadline, which is unfortunately always being pushed back with them, I really won't finish this summer. But the problem was that he left enormous archives in Lausanne in Switzerland, and which I consulted, and that's where I felt. I found the the Melville Telegram, and you know, there's so much material and my book is a you know, one book, and he made a lot of films.
This was fantastic. I always appreciate talking with you. This was so great for you to take the time out.
Thank you very much and have a good day.
All right, we're back and we were talking about Army of Shadows. And one thing I forgot to say earlier is just the way that Melville plays with form. And I love that he has multiple voiceovers in this one. And I was trying to figure out who all for sure Gerbier and Jean Francois, but are there others that have vio in this It was feeling almost a little casino to me.
Bo oh sorry vi o oh oh, I didn't come my copy didn't And with smell a vision.
I yeah, my assumption is everyone in the Resistance smelled bad at some point.
Definitely, you don't want to trade jackets with this guy. It probably stinks pretty bad.
Yeah, here will swap coats. Oh no, it's okay, you keep the coat. I'd rather take my chairs with the Germans.
I actually don't know who else has voiceovers. It's done in kind of a confusing way. I think a lot of it also is that they all have those like gruff gangster voices. I love the voiceovers because it does give it this sense that you are watching a story unfold, like he's he's reminding you of the narrative structure and
some of the cinema conventions he's using. But it also gives it, i think, an even more kind of defeatist tone, where it's like these people are reflecting on their own impending deaths.
No, that's a really good point, because yeah, he does start this with a title card and then end it with those title cards, probably the most depressing title cards ever. I mean, do you think that killed in Vietnam was bad or killed in Vietnam by his own troops was bad. These holy shit. And then that that last one for as your Bia would say, was not to run.
He decided not to run, Yeah, because I.
Mean the book was published in forty three, so you didn't know what happened to the characters, and so he's imposed this incredibly bleak kind of coda to the film, just so there's absolutely no doubt whatsoever everybody dies.
People also forget that even into forty three, it still felt like the Nazis were going to win the war, and so when you see stories either fictional or nonfiction, set in that period and early nineteen forty four, it's like there's this real sense that, like, we can't win this, and I think that's reflected in this film so brutally, like we're just gonna keep resisting even though we're all definitely going to die.
Who The overwhelming sensation, you know, that you get from this is fatalism. You know, It's beyond cynicism. It's it's a feeling that you know, this guy is about to fall at any moment.
Yeah, not one of them gets to live to see the end of the war. You know, in the way that they do the close up of you know that Bison his title card, and then La Masque and his title card. I'm like, oh, man, just each one gets worse and worse.
Do you have to wonder why he chose to make this film in nineteen sixty eight, nineteen sixty nine and have it be so defeatist, Like it would be so easy to throw in something at the end that felt more hopeful or optimistic, because like, everyone knows that how
the war ends. But I think the most to me, the most interesting stories about World War two are stories that suggest that the war was not this black and white affair where the good guys are defeating the bad guys, but that even if on paper the war has ended, like did it really ever end? And you kind of get that sense from this film, or like even if the war ended, the world's not necessarily a better place at all.
Well, you know, the struggle continues. You know, the same war that those the criminal underworld we're playing with the police is mirrored in the story of the resistance versus the Nazis, and that story continues. You know that the fact that we're talking about World War two is kind of arbitrary. Really, we could be talking about gangs, as we could be talking about fourteenth century Spain. We could,
you know what I mean. It's a much bigger picture story about loyalty, betrayal, and I'm sure there's a couple of other great words that I wrote down let me see, yeah, and a shifting moral compass that people are able to utilize whenever they need to. Really, so, you know, it just happens to be a resistant story that Melville feels affinity towards because of his own past. But it is
a very masculine story. It's a hard boiled story which he gravitates to, you know, quite naturally, as he would towards any hard boiled Hollywood film of the thirties and forties. It just happens to be a vehicle for that kind of story that he wants to tell about people in exceptional circumstances being forced to make terrible choices.
I wonder how often this is read as a Cold War film, because I do think people were still being forced to make those kinds of terrible choices, often under total secrecy, no one ever finding out what they did. And the fact that it comes out in the late sixties, the Algerian War would have been on everyone's mind in France.
But also just the way the Cold War is playing out, with this idea that regular citizens in a number of countries are getting swept up into what is basically espionage, and there is a lot of that happening in Army of Shadows. It's just not in the service of a particular government other than the Free French Forces, I guess. But now that I think about it, it does kind of remind me of some Cold War movies.
When I was touring pub the movie around Europe a couple months ago, I happened to be in the acet pot of early in and so of course I had to go to the Stasi Museum, you know, which is the old secret police headquarters now trapped in aspect. You know, they've kind of left it as it was when the Stasis were marched out of the front door in nineteen eighty nine, and it's now a museum to the surveillance techniques and the torture instruments that the East Germans were
using against their own people. And when you actually see the suspected death toll, it's way more than ten thousand of East Berlin's own citizenry disappeared during that time of the East German Republic. So nineteen sixty nine East Berlin could have very easily have been transposed to nineteen forty two Paris under the German occupation.
It's horrific to think that, especially in this kind of global mythology we have about World War two, this idea that you know, once the Nazis finally surrender and once the Japanese surrender, like everyone's free now. But really, when the war ended, you have thousands of people being killed
or imprisoned for pretty much arbitrary reasons. Like anyone who was or not anyone, but I would say probably sixty to seventy percent of people who were prisoners of war who went back to Russia were killed because they allowed themselves to be held in a prisoner of war camp. Was the logic. It's just wild. So I do think you could definitely set this later and have it feel similarly defeated or defeatist.
Well, there's always going to be a system. There's always going to be individuals outside that system who are being tortured and killed by you know, and under those circumstances, you know, it then comes down to your character as to or your desperate need for survival as to how you would act under those circumstances. So that's what I think Melville is really interested in, because he was able to see that firsthand, you know, first of all as a member of the French army and then as a
member of the resistance. Yeah.
And it's funny how his jewishness plays so little into his films in any obvious ways. He seems to think of himself as a resistance fighter first, at least in terms of his own self mythologizing.
It's interesting, but it definitely I think contributes to his feeling of being an outsider. Yeah, so you know that then feeds into his own self mythology, you know, of being that I kind of classed.
Ultimate outsider, which you can see in all of his movies. There's always some usually multiple very lonely characters on the fringes of something, and certainly there's this whole movie.
Is that? Oh absolutely yourbia with his books about engineering, as he's in that Last hide Out, What.
A fucking nut.
That's the only thing that gives him pleasure.
Fellow nerds, I'm sure we all gravitate towards Melville for multiple reasons, you know, not just the bleeding obvious.
No, I love him so much.
That's why I was so excited about doing this. That's when we get to talk about Hobbius God, one.
Of the greatest films of all time.
Well, it's definitely in my top three. Melville. I coun't decide which one is my favorite, because that would be like putting a gun to my fart and being us to make Andrew's choice.
I'm right there with you. I mean, even under Gestapo torture dress, I probably couldn't pick one.
No, I tell you what, I would refuse to run.
All right, guys, let's go ahead and take another break and play a preview for next week's show right after these brief messages. That's right, We'll be back next week with another World War two film, the kickoff check Timber with Diamonds of the Night. Until then, I want to thank my co host Andrew and Sam. So, Sam, what is the latest with you?
The latest with me is I recently started a new podcast called Erros plus Massacre that is focused on kind of more outsider cinema. There's some art house stuff in there. Some genre movies and I'm just having a great time with it, also doing a lot on my Patreon, so follow me over there.
I believe that you have a couple commentary tracks about Melville films coming out.
I do well, not coming out. I did them years ago, but be because Quino Larber have done these four KUHD re releases of some of his films, my commentaries for things like Lu Dulos, which is another one of his great great films, are being poureded over. I think the same thing's happening to Unflick. But yeah, I still can't believe I've gotten to do Melville commentaries like please write that on my tombstone?
And Andrew, what's going out with you?
Sir? Well, Like I said before, I just got back from Europe where I was touring around my latest punk rock documentary called pub the movie with the subject of the film, and then I put him on a plane back to Melbourne and I jumped on a plane to West Africa, and while I was there for a week, I ended up doing kind of like the start of a multi layered project. First up, I was prepping for a feature film that I'm going to do over there,
with one of their most out there directors, Ninja. If you've ever i've seen any Ghanian movie trailers on YouTube, that was probably the guy who made them absolutely nuts. I'm doing a feature film with him in January called The Taller They Come. It's a mockumentary about an Australian would be Tarantino who blags his way onto a Ghanian film set and tries to do a Kung Fu remake
of The Harder They Come. So while I was there, I was filming a documentary on my camera and that's coming out in October film Safari Ghana, and that will end up being toured around UK and US for a Kickstarter campaign which will hopefully go and fund The Taller They Come in January. But then while I was there, Ninja got me to star in a movie that he directed called White Devil Freedom Is Coming. You can actually type that into YouTube and have it come up for free.
Two days on a film set, and it turned out I was the title character, a modern day white slaver running my own plantation in Kumasi in Ghana. So it's wild. I got to kickstart my career as a lead actor in African kung fu movies.
That's incredible, like the.
Wildest seven days of my life. And you know, I had breakfast with Amlde Marcos, so that's really saying something, you know. So I'm kind of like, I'll be touring this around the US in late October early November. So that's when I'll be knocking on your door, Sam.
Two couches you can sleep on.
Wicked, I'll be counting on it actually, But yeah, touring around screening that and probably a tenth anniversary screening of the Search for Wang Wing as well, since it has been a decade since that movie came out. Oh my god, has it really only shit?
I know, I'm really afraid.
Well, thank you so much folks for being on the show. Thanks to everybody for listening. If you want to hear more of me shooting off my mouth, check out some of the other shows that I work on. They are all available at Weirdinglymedia dot com. Thanks especially to our Patreon community. If you want to join the community, visit patreon dot com slash Projection Booth. Every donation we get helps the Projection Booth take over the world.