#755: MELVILLE, Jean-Pierre: Le Silence De La Mer (1949)

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MELVILLE, Jean-Pierre (France)
Le Silence De La Mer [1949]
Spine #755
Blu-ray


Jean-Pierre Melville began his superb feature filmmaking career with this powerful adaptation of an influential underground novel written during the Nazi occupation of France. A cultured, naively idealistic German officer is billeted in the home of a middle-aged man and his grown niece; their response to his presence — their only form of resistance — is complete silence. Constructed with elegant minimalism and shot, by the legendary Henri Decaë, with hushed eloquence, Le silence de la mer points the way toward Melville's later films about resistance and the occupation (Léon Morin, Priest; Army of Shadows) yet remains a singularly eerie masterwork in its own right.

87 minutes
Black & White
Monaural
in French and German
1:33:1 aspect ratio
Criterion Release 2015
Director/Writers


From the novel by Vercors (Jean Marcel Bruller).

A

Film Rating (0-60):

60

The Extras

The Booklet

Forty-page booklet featuring an essay by critic Geoffrey O’Brien and a selection from Rui Nogueira’s 1971 book Melville on Melville.

Commentary

None.

Short

24 Hours in the Life of.a Clown (1946), director Melville’s first film.

Interview 1

With film scholar Ginette Vincendeau.

Code Name Melville (2008)

A seventy-six-minute documentary on Melville’s time in the French Resistance and his films about it.

Melville Steps Out of the Shadows (2010)

A forty-two-minute documentary about Le Silence de la Mer.

Interview 2

With Melville from 1959.

Extras Rating (0-40):

39

60 + 39 =

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