Melville: Le Silence de la Mer (The Silence of the Sea) (1949)

Jean-Pierre Melville’s debut film was an adaptation of Vencors’ novel The Silence of the Sea, a key text of the French Resistance. Both an allegory and a blueprint for action, it revolves around an elderly man and his daughter in a small rural town who are forced to billet a German soldier. In protest, they refuse to speak to him, meaning that most of Melville’s adaptation is free of dialogue, instead relying on inner monologues drawn from Vencors’ text.  On top of that, the film was actually shot in Vencors’ house, among the rooms where he wrote the novel – and as a film that was written and directed in the same space, it very much plays out as a reflection on auteurism, as Melville takes stock of his own personal involvement in the Resistance, as well as his subsequent excommunication, to start to build his own distinctive protest voice. And as in so many of his later masterpieces, we’re presented with something like parlour cinema, film that yearns to be produced and distributed in total secrecy, watched furtively at hearths before being burned forever, always attuned to forces that might occupy it if the proper precautions aren’t taken. For that reason, it’s perhaps strongest when the monologues don’t dwell on the war at any specific length, since that’s when Melville can really indulge his fatalistic paranoia, which in this case also means coming to terms with the lurking spectre of the Holocaust - among other things, Vencors was one of very few novelists to grapple with the Final Solution as it was actually occurring. At the same time, Melville’s taste for poetic, pregnant images and objects emerges fully-formed – the second act, which moves away from the house, could play as a visual essay in the vein of Resnais – until it feels as if the most precious relics in the country, the very soul of France, have been gathered in this small, rustic living room. By the end, it’s less an adaptation than an attempt to exhume the novel, to return to a moment of Resistance that left Melville behind – in a kind of reverse exorcism, it attempts to restore unquiet spirits, setting silence atremble with all the protest it's subsumed.