Jean-Pierre Melville’s The Silence of the Sea, which was a significant commercial success on its release in 1949, presents a much more ambiguous portrayal of life in occupied France than La Bataille du Rail. At that time the Jewish Melville, who had fought in the Resistance and for the Free French, was very much an outsider in the French film industry. (His family name incidentally was Grumbach: he had chosen Melville as his resistant name because of his love for the American writer of Moby Dick.) He had only one short film to his credit, 24 Hours in the Life of a Clown/Vingt-quatre heures de la vie d’un clown, but he wanted to direct one of the most famous books to emerge from the Resistance era, Vercors’ The Silence of the Sea. Vercors was the pseudonym of Jean Bruller, who during the war had been a clandestine writer and publisher. He and his colleagues from the Resistance were apprehensive of any film version being made of The Silence of the Sea, believing that insufficient time had elapsed since the events in question. Melville himself didn’t have permission to make the film from the CNC (Centre National de la Cinématographie), nor a union-recognised crew, nor access to good quality film stock. [9] He thus proposed to Vercors that he would submit the finished film to a jury of Resistance members. Their agreement was required before the film could be shown publicly; otherwise Melville would burn the negatives. The endorsement of these veterans meant that the film was eventually released publicly in April 1949, and it went on to be seen by 1.3 million spectators. [10]
Expertly shot in black and white on authentic locations by future Nouvelle Vague cinematographer Henri Decae, The Silence of the Sea examines what happens when a Wehrmacht officer von Ebrennac (Howard Vernon) is billeted with an elderly, unnamed French uncle (Jean-Marie Robain) and his niece (Nicole Stephane, who in real life was a former resistant) in their provincial home. Von Ebrennac is far from being a fanatical Nazi: a cultured Francophile, he relishes playing Bach on the piano in his host family’s book-lined sitting-room. He dreams of a long-lasting and mutually beneficial union between his own country and France, but when he visits Paris and learns of the plans for the Final Solution, he is so ashamed that he volunteers to fight on the Russian Front.
The uncle and the niece however respond to his presence in their lives by maintaining a stony silence in his company. Night after night he attempts to engage them in conversation, yet in this battle of wills, the French won’t be the ones to surrender their position. Resistance then in The Silence of the Sea is not about heroic physical actions against the enemy: instead it’s the dignified refusal of supposedly ‘weaker’ members of a community (and by extension France) to speak to their oppressors. Some writers have questioned how ‘heroic’ these tactics are, with Brett Bowles arguing that, ‘the uncle and the niece’s strategy of resistance through silence is at best inconsistent, motivated as much by self-preservation and their own emotional needs as their patriotic duty to snub their unwanted house guest’. [11] Such an assessment seems unduly harsh on these characters: their practical options in terms of resistance are sorely limited and there is a consistency to their moral stance, which is only temporarily broken, when the niece utters one paring word to von Ebrennac – ‘Adieu’.
Released seven years after The Silence of the Sea, Robert Bresson’s typically austere A Man Escaped embodies the spirit of the Resistance, even if the film never actually mentions the word. It’s based, notes Keith Reader, [12] on the real-life escape from Montluc prison in Lyon of resistant Andre Devigny. (Montluc was where Klaus Barbie, the head of the Gestapo in Lyon, had Resistance leader Jean Moulin tortured to death.) Bresson’s central character Fontaine (François Leterrier) is being transferred in the opening scene to this jail, where he will be sentenced to death, having been guilty of blowing up a railway bridge. As with The Silence of the Sea, silence is integral to A Man Escaped in which the camera is often trained on the prisoners’ faces, observing how they carry out their daily rituals, although Bresson’s creative approach to sound design means that this is far from being a silent film. Quietly biding his time, Fontaine uses the sparsest of materials – a spoon, the metal spring in bed, strips – in order to achieve the seemingly miraculous escape from his cell. For this particular soldier, resistance is almost a compulsion: in his own words, it is his duty “to fight against my walls, my door, my cell, to fight to be free”.
Léon Morin, Priest, which came out in 1961, was the second black and white Melville film to be set in France during the years of German occupation, and again proved very successful at the box-office, attracting some 1.7 million spectators. [13] An adaptation of an autobiographical novel by Beatrix Beck, its story unfolds in an Alpine town, where a communist widow Barny (Emmanuele Riva from Hiroshima mon amour (1959)), who provides the film’s voiceover, sexually desires the Catholic priest Morin (Jean-Paul Belmondo from Godard’s Breathless/À bout de soufflé (1960)). The Resistance is present in Léon Morin, Priest, albeit in the margins. We glimpse several Maquis at the baptism of their children, before they head back into the hills, and we hear explosions they have triggered. And Belmondo’s priest actively helps the cause by sheltering those at the risk of deportation, whilst an elderly colleague provides false birth certificates for Jewish children. Vincendau [14] in her detailed analysis of the film stresses that Melville excluded much of the historical background contained in Beck’s book, notably Barney’s own Resistance activities. The focus becomes the increasingly intense relationship between Barney and the titular priest. It would be a further eight years before Melville finally got to make The Army in the Shadows/L’Armée des ombres, in which the Resistance was placed centre-stage.
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