![]() Described as the godfather of the nouvelle vague , or new wave, of young French filmmakers in the 1960s, Melville was, and still is, the filmmaker’s filmmaker. ![]() His work has been hugely influential and remains so to this day, with filmmakers like Jim Jarmusch and Quentin Tarantino citing him as a major influence. Melville, a self confessed misanthrope (ii), thought gangsters were ‘pathetic losers, but the gangster story, with betrayal as one of its driving forces, was a very suitable vehicle for the particular form of modern tragedy called film noir.’ (iii). Melville’s main themes were betrayal, honour and the impossibility of love. A reference to what Ginette Vincendeau calls ‘the porous bond between crime and the law’ (i). Delon’s androgynous, slightly dissolute, good looks and his solitary forays into the Parisian underworld, suggesting both a sexual and a moral ambiguity. Melville wanted to create black-and-white film noir movies in colour and in Un Flic he reached new heights. His colour palette again matching Delon’s eyes, but skewing toward the blue, rather than the greenish blue of cyan. Mise-en-scène, refers to all the elements a director places inside the frame. Melville’s mise-en-scène, with its blue/cyan colour palette, designed to match Delon’s cold blue eyes, was also unforgettable. It is unfortunate that Le Samourai was unavailable for this retrospective, for in it Alain Delon was unforgettable as the solitary hit man Jef Costello: meticulous and silent with the code of a Samurai warrior, to whom failure meant ritual suicide for honour. Melville’s favourite actor, Alain Delon plays the Cop, which was unusual because he usually played gangsters in Melville’s films. No doubt they thought American audiences would find this more attractive. When Un Flic, which means A Cop, was released in America, they changed the title to Dirty Money. Un Flic is the third film in a trilogy of Melville’s film noir-inspired gangster movies that include Le Samurai and Le Cercle Rouge or The Red Circle. He drove around in big American cars and loved American food, perversely preferring American mayonnaise, in a tube, to French mayonnaise! When the German army occupied France during WWII, Melville, who was 23 and Jewish, joined the Resistance, later using his experiences in a trilogy of films that included, what many argue is his finest film, L'Armée des Ombres or Army of Shadows. He loved all things American and always wore a large Stetson hat and sunglasses. He had an encyclopaedic knowledge of cinema, and loved American movies, in particular the dark mean streets of 1940s Los Angeles film noir. īorn in 1917, Melville was given a hand-cranked camera for his sixth birthday and from that moment on became obsessed with film. I’d like to thank Geoff Gardner and Cinema Reborn for asking me to introduce Jean-Pierre Melville’s final film, Un Flic, which is also the final film in this aptly titled Jean-Pierre Melville: Master of Shadows and Silence retrospective.
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