‘David Altmejd’s work is a unique and heady mix of science and magic, science fiction and gothic romanticism: a post-apocalyptic vision which is at the same time essentially optimistic, containing as it always does the potential for regeneration, evolution and invention.
‘‘A perfect object for me’, the artist has said, ‘is something that is extremely seductive and extremely repulsive at the same time’. Decay exists in balance with regeneration, the exquisite in tandem with the grotesque. The sculpted heads that have been Altmejd’s recent focus provoke that shiver of the uncanny lifelike sculpture tends to induce, but skilfully realistic features are interspersed with crude expressionism, gobbets of raw matter or hanks of fur. They have a hallucinatory quality – vivid and startling. One head might sprout another, inverted, so that they they share a pair of eyes, or a face is split into a trio of profiles and half-a-dozen eyes, as if refracted by a kaleidoscope. In others the faces are gone, as if they have been scooped out, but the gaping wounds reveal cavities of dazzling crystal or the inside of a hollowed-out fruit, as if to collapse the categories of animal, vegetable and mineral. There is an immediate sensuality in the artist’s juxtaposition of finely-wrought realism with crude gesture; the proximity of crystals and delicate gold chains with fur and abject matter suggesting ever-present decay.
‘In counter-balance to the aesthetic of profusion is a sculptural impulse to containment and order, evinced in gridded forms and orthogonal mirrored structures recalling Sol Lewitt or Lucas Samaras. Some of Altmejd’s best-known works are his vast, labyrinthine vitrines built of Plexiglas, and often with mirrored elements. They play on the aesthetics of design and display as well as minimalism, but these structures are not simply a means to contain or protect the elements housed within. Rather, the entire structure is an organism or a machine, making visible the processes of growth and decay, generation and destruction that take place inside it. Movement is frozen, but sculptural elements are animated through repetition and incremental change, like the stuttering frames of stop-motion film.
‘Altmejd described himself early in his career as a ‘process artist’. His works not only reveal the process of their making, but suggest that those processes have simply been paused in their unfolding. His monochrome relief panels are austere in comparison to the heads, focusing our attention on the plaster-like material and the actions wrought on it − where it has fallen in wet splats, where a brittle, chalky surface is scratched or fractured, where hands have gouged and clawed. Hands themselves, in cast form, appear and multiply in some of the sculptures, fostering the illusion that the works create themselves. Monumental figures, such as the ‘Bodybuilders’ and the ‘Watchers’, are similarly engaged in their own making or unmaking, sprouting hands that clutch and mould the very substance of their bodies.’ — White Cube
Philippa Snow: I wanted to ask you about how you got into using the werewolf motif. David Altmejd: It was pretty intuitive. I think I just felt as though my work was a little too structural, very minimalist; I would use large light tables, I would use Plexiglas, so all the materials were pretty cold. I just thought at one point that these structures I was building needed to be infected with something. Then I started thinking, what would be the one object that would contrast with them the most? So I thought about a body part. Actually, I thought about a head, which I thought would be powerful enough, and would contrast with the coldness of the structure. I thought with a head, I could start creating a very particular energy.
But then I thought that maybe a human body part, the human head, was a little — not necessarily cliché, but certainly something that had become commonplace in contemporary art. Some of my favourite artists have been Kiki Smith, and Louise Bourgeois, and Robert Gober, and I love their work; but I did feel that following work like theirs, the use of human body parts in art had become more predictable. So I thought instead about referring to the body of the werewolf, which in my mind is the most humanlike monster: meaning the werewolf body part would be just as powerful to look at as the human body part. It’s possible for a viewer to identify with it. But at the same time, it’s weird instead of being familiar. And I really like that.
So that’s the reason I started using the werewolf body parts in my art. And very soon afterwards, once it found its place in my work, I started being conscious of ideas of transformation, and energy, and contrasts between light and darkness, and tension, and all these things, so I just decided to keep the werewolf as a kind of totemic figure in my work.
PS: It’s interesting that you mention the transformation aspect of it, because a lot of your work has the appearance of being…this is an odd thing to say about sculpture, but it almost has the look of something that’s in flux, or something that’s in development. It looks like an organic thing.
DA: Yeah, and it’s important for me to feel that the object, or the sculpture itself, is in the process of developing. One of the things I realised about sculpture that made it really amazing, and that gave it so much potential, is the fact that it exists in a real space. It doesn’t exist in the space of representation. So it exists in the world in almost the same way that a body does, or a person does, you know?
PS: Right. A photograph or a painting of a body that’s life sized is never going to be like a body in the same way as a sculpture of one at the same scale.
DA: And the body of a person is probably the most amazing thing that exists, for so many reasons. So the fact that sculpture inhabits the same space means that it has the potential for having the same kind of presence. Ever since I realised that, I’ve been trying to use the body of a person as a model; and one of the characteristics of a human body is that it’s constantly transforming. A person is never a finished object, and that’s part of what makes them amazing.
PS: And because a lot of the structures are quite dreamlike, there’s quite often the suggestion of a psychological transformation as well.
DA: Absolutely, yeah.
PS: Are there any filmmakers you’re particularly inspired by?
DA: There are certainly filmmakers whose work has excited me. Often I don’t like saying this, because I think that people consider it really, really obvious, but I love David Cronenberg.
PS: Oh, me too!
DA: But not necessarily because of his taste for the organic or the weird. I like him conceptually. I like the way he builds a movie. I like the way he understands — and this is my interpretation, I don’t know if it’s his, but I just have a feeling that he understands the film as being this independent object that develops its own intelligence, and its own language; its own logic, its own sexuality. I kind of like the fact that he steps back and lets the film develop by itself as if it was a body. Who else?
PS: I mean: David Lynch was the big one I was thinking of. But I’m always thinking about David Lynch.
DA: I would say that Lynch has been very, very important for me. Just as much as certain American visual artists from the eighties and the nineties are an influence — ones that still work today, but were very well-known then, like Cindy Sherman, Paul McCarthy, Tony Oursler, Mike Kelley — I see David Lynch the same way. They were very important for me at the beginning. I really admired that attitude; the space that they were exploring, which was somewhere between supercomedy and superdrama. You know how sometimes there are scenes in Lynch where you don’t know if you’re supposed to laugh, or to feel uncomfortable?
PS: I was thinking about it because of his being very interested in the fragmentation and the refraction of the human body — but especially in the head. There’s always a lot of stuff about head trauma, decapitation. Are you watching the new series of Twin Peaks?
DA: No, I haven’t been.
PS: Oh it’s amazing! I’m a Lynch obsessive anyway, but it’s really pulled me right back into the depths of that obsession.
DA: I do intend to watch it; I saw the first episode and I’m meaning to go back. I really loved the way the special effects are so clumsy, if I’m allowed to call them that?
PS: He loves that, I think.
DA: Because they could have been high-tech, but he obviously chose otherwise. That was amazing. That was completely his sensibility. Nobody else could have done that and actually pulled it off.
PS: No — it’s like the robin at the end of Blue Velvet. It’s an aesthetic decision.
DA: And so funny and not-funny at the same time. Personally, I like being uncomfortable. I think my favourite kind of laughter is uncomfortable laughter; and I think the best horror is the sort of horror that makes me want to giggle because I’m so uncomfortable.
PS: On an unrelated note (or maybe a related note, as we’re talking about uncomfortable laughter) — I read in an interview that you’re really into the Real Housewives?
DA: Oh my God! Yeah, yeah, absolutely!
PS: Because I’ve never seen the Real Housewives shows, but I did do a thing this year for which I had to watch every episode of Keeping Up With The Kardashians ever broadcast in one month. There are thirteen series of it, so that was intense.
DA: I’ve never watched Keeping Up With The Kardashians, but my idea is that it’s one family, so they’re all sort of together in this, right? They’re not all rivals? But the Real Housewives are so great because they’re all rivals.
PS: Is that inspiring somehow, because you’re watching — I don’t know, humanity play itself out?
DA: I mean: it’s hard to see the humanity.
PS: Really? It’s just totally inhumane?
DA: Totally inhumane. I think that it’s totally human, because even the producers are human, so it’s technically a product of humanity. So it’s human in that way. But the set-up is so unlike anything you could understand or experience. I can’t start to think or imagine what it would be like to have a camera on you all the time, or have people there encouraging you to drink wine all the time so that you’ll be in a volatile mood. And producers who will make more money if there’s a fight! It’s a horrifying set-up. It’s like putting a rat in a maze, a labyrinth: of course they’re going to act like rats. They’re in a context that’s kind of indescribable. So it’s hard to understand them. But it’s exciting to see human beings try to survive in such a weird, extreme environment.
PS: We could tie it into our earlier discussion by saying that Real Housewives is a constructed take on the organic. And there are a lot of physically constructed bodies in reality TV, also! Certainly in the case of the Kardashians.
DA: Yeah, you mean facelifts and so on?
PS: And really extreme body augmentations. I find that fascinating, as well.
DA: And it’s funny, because with the Real Housewives there are different — they call them franchises, but it means there are spin-offs in different cities. And they’re usually groups of women who have transformed their bodies in very different ways. For example, the Real Housewives of New York are a group of women who are transforming in one very specific direction, and then you go to Beverly Hills and the Housewives there are taking a totally different transformative route. They end up looking like different species, in the end. It’s amazing.
___ Show
First Werewolf, 1999
Untitled (Jane), 2003
Untitled (Black), 2003
Untitled (Blue Jay), 2004
Untitled (Swallow), 2004
The Lovers, 2004
The Builders, 2005
Untitled, 2006
Untitled, 2006
The New North, 2007
Untitled (Dark), 2008
The Center, 2008
The Egg, 2008
Untitled, 2010
Untitled, 2011
Untitled, 2011
Untitled, 2012
Untitled 3 (Rabbit Holes), 2013
Untitled 5 (Rabbit Holes), 2013
Untitled 6 (Rabbit Holes), 2013
Untitled, 2014
The Flux and the Puddle, 2014
Eye, 2015
Le Grand Theatre, 2016
The Vibrating Man, 2019
*
p.s. Hey. ** David Ehrenstein, Thank you sharing your wisdom and knowledge about Melville, David. ** john christopher, Well, hello there, sir. Happy almost Halloween! That’s one wild coincidence about the New Narrative turning up in such a timely fashion. Nice that it was found on the street too, I don’t know why. I’m doing all right, thanks. You? You sound good. Thanks about the masks. Yes, there were, I think, two gifs from ‘Season of the Witch’ taken from the evil TV commercial thing. I like that movie. People seem to think it’s the runt of the litter/franchise, but I beg to differ. Good to see you! ** Misanthrope, Okay, that sounds essentially like good under the circumstances news, and, at least in my case, lifelong little things do seem to get less little as you evolve, i.e. my stupid back thing. Good you’re having a nuclear (whoa!) scan though. You’re on it, and that’s all I can ask. Wow, they still celebrate Columbus Day over there? Weird. You still have gyms. Ours are kaput for the time being. Yeah, sending the first however many pages of a novel is pretty standard, from what people tell me. Good, you sound rather fit. ** politekid, Hey, Oscar! Everything pretty okay with me, I think. I’m also a big believer that unclunked means full speed ahead. All right, TM cut you loose. Their loss, fuck their eyes and their mothers’ eyes, etc. Super wishing I could see the Michael Clarke show. Ha ha, its audience sounds exactly like the audience I would imagine it would have, and, yes, I don’t have a clue how to enjoy that type either. The weirdest foreigners. Those kinds of dramas are the airborne, contemporaneous quicksand that cartoons and old movies used to warn us about. That pamphlet sounds like a total keeper, yeah, def. That is a load of twee right there. I like me some twee sometimes. I mean I love Wes Anderson’s films, and I guess they’re supposed to be twee. And twee pop music can be among pop’s best. So, yeah. I’m not sure I fully understand your question about ‘Guide’. I think I still believe everything I was trying to posit in that book, but I would venture to say that I’m maybe not as monstrous as the guy I semi-pretended was its author. So there’s a hard to understand answer to your hard (for me) to understand question, ha ha. I’ve been up to … working on stuff (new film funding seek, film script to be directed by Gisele, other stuff) and basically okay except I broke my toe forever ago and it still hurts. Excellence to see you, pal! And to hear about you, sir! I will endeavour to make Halloween sing via the blog until the 31st arrives and destroys our fun. ** Brian O’Connell, Hi, Brian. Melville’s pretty great. Not everything IMO, but he had a pretty great run there for a decade or so. Midterms, man, all the luck acing those, and nose to the grindstone, and take sanity breaks, and so on. They put new restrictions on here, but they aren’t too bad, and yet the cases continue to grow fast, so I suspect it’s about to get heavier. But so far I still think we’ve been pretty lucky. Stuff any better or better-feeling there? Warmest wishes in speedy return. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. Your new episode did the major trick for my physical and psychological well being as well as adding motion to my booty this weekend, so thank you! I’d watch that Margiela doc, and I’ll try to. Thanks for that tip, buddy. ** Ian, Morning (if it’s morning), Ian. Exactly, re: that cool thing about him and his stuff. Granted, I haven’t read ‘Candy’ in many yonks, but I think it must still be tons of fun. Is it? Thank you for your info too. Two way street and all of that. ** Dominik, Hi, Dominick!!! It’s kind of like that here too – gloomy, melancholic, etc. I kind of like it though. You having listed to Cheap Trick just made my face look like a face you would have carved into a classic pumpkin. I did see and, of course, like ‘Suicide Room’. And I think I’ve used quite a few gifs from it in my gif books. How is his new film? I’m okay. My toe still hurts, but it’s starting to hurt less, and that’s all I can hope for. My weekend was pretty lowkey-ish. Saw the Christo show at the Pompidou, it was meh. Ate very good pizza, which was a bigger deal than it sounds because it was the first cheese I’d eaten in a long time, me being in a vegan phase. Zoomed with one of my oldest friends, the poet Amy Gerstler. Worked on stuff. How did your weekend turn out? Ha ha, nice love there. Macho love baking a huge wedding cake for sissy love, Dennis. ** Steve Erickson, I would have to go with ‘Le Samourai’ and ‘Army of Shadows’ maybe. Not having seen or having any intention of seeing that ‘Boys in the Band’ remake, I think ‘what is the point’ is the absolute question. Everything you say about it radiates from the mere knowledge of its existence. Hope the new glasses help. ** Jeff Jackson, Hi, Jeff. Huh, ever since the blog was ‘fixed’ that message you got is planted at the top of the comments every day, and I don’t know why. Anyway, your comment made it through, obvs. I haven’t read ‘Melville on Melville’, no, but it has long tempted me. I love ‘Did You Hear Them?’. It was one of my very favorites of hers when I did my initial Nouveau Roman reading binge in the mid-80s. ‘Childhood’ was her big hit. It’s nice, but it’s much more conventional than her others. I wouldn’t put it at the top of your list. Excellent if you’re cracked the novel’s vexing point. Right, the new Julien Calendar! I still haven’t scored it. Will do today. Everyone, Jeff Jackson’s awesome band/musical unit has a new EP out, their third, which is undoubtedly a must hear among must hears. Please join me in grabbing it on/from bandcamp right here. Skype this week sounds great. Just let me know when’s good for you. ** Kyler, Good morning to you, Kyler, and I’m sorry I’m wrecking your morning, ha ha. Or no ha ha. Or both. Um, yes, I think I understand what he’s writing about ‘The Marbled Swarm’. He seems to be aligning it with Polari, this coded, made-up language gays used to us in the UK to communicate secretly back in the severe repression days. I will say that ‘TMS’ has absolutely nothing to do with Polari from my (the writer’s) perspective. I never thought about it. And ‘TMS’ is not about disguising the narrator’s alleged queerness since his being queer is greatly in question in the first place. But it’s an interesting and unexpected way to try to interpret that novel, I guess. So, I think I get what he was writing. But if you didn’t, that’s not your problem, man. May your morning end up very well. ** Right. Back to the Halloween celebrations today via a galerie exhibition of the works of David Altmejd. Spooky fun too be had should you allow. See you tomorrow.
‘At first glance, Jean-Pierre Melville’s body of work might seem to display a schizophrenic split between two currents or tendencies. The first is in total symbiosis with the history of France and is rooted in the filmmaker’s own life, notably in his involvement in the Resistance from the beginning of the Occupation, his participation in Gaullist networks, and his clandestine work under various pseudonyms (Cartier, Nono). He reached England after a punishing odyssey: in the Pyrenees, he lost his brother, who was abandoned by his guide and died in the snow, only to be imprisoned in Spain before managing to board a ship. He joined the army and fought in the Italian and French campaigns. During the years I knew him, he always said that “the army and the war were the best period in my life,” overlooking his ordeals and suffering and the death of his brother. He would jokingly tell me that he crossed over to England to see Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, repeatedly describing the film’s initial scenes and dwelling on that first flashback in the Turkish bath: “one of the most beautiful flashbacks in the history of cinema, dear boy, along with the one in Henry King’s Twelve O’Clock High.”
‘Melville’s life in the Resistance inspired three of his masterpieces: Le silence de la mer; Léon Morin, Priest; and Army of Shadows, which in the United States are often unfairly eclipsed by his series of gangster films. Despite its imperfections and the deplorable casting of Edouard Dermithe, one could also add Les enfants terribles, adapted from Cocteau, who speaks the film’s magnificent voice-over and whom Melville described as “a French ambassador to France.” It should be added that Melville admired Clouzot and Becker. He wrote a superb article on Le trou shortly after Becker’s death.
‘The second current appears to be the exact opposite of the first and is shaped by a fascination with the United States and American culture. Let’s not forget that Jean-Pierre Grumbach chose the pseudonym Melville after reading Herman Melville’s Pierre: or, The Ambiguities, paying homage to the author of Moby Dick, a novel whose sublime first sentence he loved to quote: “Call me Ishmael.” I could as easily have referred to his love of Anglo-Saxon culture, for Melville also venerated Aldous Huxley, Oscar Wilde, Graham Greene, David Lean, and Carol Reed’s The Third Man. But the United States and American cinema played a defining role. This was a cinema he had learned to love not in school but by discovering the films in a movie theater with the public, in his youth, notably thanks to the double programs (most often of Warner productions) at the Apollo theater at 20, rue de Clichy, which had a retractable roof and was inaugurated in 1932 with a run of James Whale’s Frankenstein. On the day the program changed over, one could see the two new films added to the bill at the last screening—four films in one evening! Lino Ventura, the star of Melville’s Le deuxième souffle and Army of Shadows, also nostalgically told me about the Apollo theater eventually shuttered by the Germans for screening Litvak’s Confession of a Nazi Spy. It was in pre- and postwar movie theaters that Melville developed his passionate love for Huston, Stevens, Robert Wise, Ford, Capra, and especially William Wyler, filmmakers who were sometimes disdained by the very critics who championed his own films (it’s fair to say time often proved Melville right). Melville could be extremely violent in his rejection of certain films; he never forgave me for taking him to see Lang’s Moonfleet and especially Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar. On the other hand, he loved Kazan’s A Face in the Crowd and its near total absence of camera movements.
‘One finds traces of this American cinema in Melville’s films: Bob le flambeur is a friendly, relaxed homage to The Asphalt Jungle, without the moral tragedy, while the plot of Le samouraï is inspired by that of This Gun for Hire (the cat is replaced by the canary). Melville also loved Odds Against Tomorrow, which was constantly being screened at his film studio (I saw it with him eleven times). He had the wallpaper of its hotel rooms reproduced both in Léon Morin and Le doulos, and closely imitated the series of shots and camera movements in the waiting sequence that precedes the film’s holdup. I was with Melville at the Triomphe theater when he discovered André de Toth’s The City Is Dark (a.k.a Crime Wave), which we saw twice. He would twice pay tribute to this remarkable film noir, with the toothpick chewed on by the detective in Le doulos and the broken cigarette Paul Meurisse pulls out of his pocket at the end of Le deuxième souffle.
‘While the political gravity of his life in the Resistance and the thrills of American genre filmmaking may seem like contradictory influences, they are peripheral if not superficial, and they in no way compromise a body of work striking in its coherence, consistency, and unity of tone and style. It is as if Melville managed to unify his sources of inspiration, to rid them of any superfluous elements, through visual rigor, dramaturgical sobriety, and narrative economy. No patriotic tirades, no ostentatious declarations here, but a restrained, stripped-down plot, which benefitted from the economy of Melville’s means of production. He produced his first films on a shoestring: Le silence de la mer is basically a single-set film, shot in the Studio Jenner, which he had just founded in 1947, and in real outdoor locations, with a bare-bones crew that outraged contemporary unions (in this respect, he was anticipating Steven Soderbergh). In subsequent projects, I saw him manage to create a beautiful set with two flats, a few props, and an inventive use of light. In my documentary My Personal Journey Through the French Cinema—in which I describe my first encounter with Melville for the interview that would lead to our friendship and, several months later, my appointment as his third assistant director on Léon Morin—I show how each of Melville’s films finds him reusing the door to his studios, whether as the entrance to nightclubs in Le samouraï and Le deuxième souffle or to a New York building in Two Men in Manhattan. You can also spot the staircase at the back of the big soundstage at Studio Jenner in nearly all the films he directed.
‘He started off with an utterly crazy gamble. Unable to obtain the rights for the novel Le silence de la mer by Vercors (a pseudonym for Jean Bruller), which had been written in 1942 while the author was in the underground, he managed to move forward with production by committing to show the completed film to a jury of leading members of the Resistance and to burn the negative if they did not agree with it. I can only admire this wild audacity, which also reflects Melville’s extreme confidence in his own artistic abilities. An audacity that breathes life into this magnificent and demanding film, allowing Melville to shoot it as a long monologue spoken by a German officer who never succeeds in getting a reaction out of the old man and young girl he addresses. The listeners’ silence becomes a form of resistance, a refusal to compromise with an enemy, no matter how seductive. A magnificent theme, for an unbelievably ambitious film. Along with Guitry’s The Story of a Cheat, it is one of the only films in the history of cinema to dare to attempt this style of narrative. One finds the same originality in Léon Morin, Priest, another masterpiece, which deals with the Occupation through the character of a communist woman (not bad for a Gaullist director!). Women are rare in Melville’s world, but Léon Morin’s Barny is strong and independent. And she falls in love with a priest who is in the Resistance. A meditation on the meaning of the practice of one’s faith, Léon Morin is also a subtle chronicle of a dark period, with its yellow stars and denunciations, one of the only films to show various forgotten episodes such as the replacement by German soldiers of the Italian troops who had occupied certain parts of France. Army of Shadows, another Resistance film, includes a few autobiographical details that are not found in Kessel’s novel, such as the nocturnal boarding of a ship. In a certain way, it merges and reconciles the two tendencies. This reflection on commitment and courage (a courage one also finds in the protagonists of Léon Morin and the grandfather and granddaughter in Le silence) is filmed like a thriller; the masterful photography by the late Pierre Lhomme is no less remarkable than that of Decaë in Bob le flambeur and Nicolas Hayer in Le doulos.
‘Melville’s style diverged from the American movies he loved in crucial ways. Of the American influence, Melville keeps neither the enthusiasm and momentum one feels in Walsh’s films nor the warmth dear to Ford and Capra. Here, too, he privileges the clean, minimal style Wyler favored and the pared-down approach Wellman adopted in The Ox-Bow Incident. He focuses his dramatic structures on a few obsessions such as betrayal (in the Resistance films), apparent commitment to promises made, and solitude. Like the filmmaker himself, the Melville hero lives in a room without windows (or with a cramped view, like Delon’s in Le samouraï). Melville often goes against Hollywood principles, as with the drawn-out length of his shots, the importance of silences, and especially his rejection of omnipresent music. He often had problems with his composers, rightfully rejecting Michel Legrand’s score for Le cercle rouge (Eric Demarsan’s score is a better fit) and John Lewis’s for Le deuxième souffle. Someone should try to find Lewis’s score: what I’ve heard of it shows that he refused to imitate what he had done for Odds Against Tomorrow. But in all the films, one remains struck by the intelligent parsimony with which Melville uses music.
‘Another violation of a Hollywood code: the refusal to use certain explanatory reverse shots. In Le doulos, Serge Reggiani is burying something near a streetlight. He hears footsteps and stops. The steps fade into the distance. In any American film, the studio would have forced the filmmaker to show this passerby. But Melville stays on Reggiani and creates an incredible tension by explaining nothing. From a vigorous, tumultuous cinema full of sound and fury, he invented dark, morose worlds, with characters who seem on their last legs, imposing a tone close to that of Robert Bresson. Le doulos, Le deuxième souffle, and Le samouraï are undeniable successes. While I admire the acutely intelligent way in which he adapted the novels he selected, I find his original screenplays—Two Men in Manhattan, Le cercle rouge, Un flic—more conventional, perhaps even simplistic. There is one out-and-out failure among the adaptations, Magnet of Doom, in which Melville tones down and betrays Simenon’s novel and bungles the entire American part. Perhaps it was better to dream America than to film it.
‘Melville was also a real tyrant on the set, terrifying me throughout the shoot of Léon Morin, Priest before convincing his producer to take me on as a publicist. In life, though, he was a warm raconteur who dragged you around Paris recalling a thousand memories.’ — Bertrand Tavernier
You have said that all your films to date were merely rough drafts. Is this also true of Le Samourai?
Certainly. I’m incapable of doing anything but rough drafts. Each time I see one of my films again, then and only then can I see what I should have done. But I only see things this clearly once the finished print is being shown on the screen everywhere and it’s too late to do anything about it. I have never been satisfied by my films, never.
You have often been described as ‘an American director’, sometimes with implied criticism. How do you feel about this?
I have been tidied away once and for all in a drawer in a sort of filing cabinet under the label ‘American’. This is quite wrong. I’ve put up with it for five years, but now I’ve had enough: I am absolutely not an American director. If by this people mean that I make my films with enormous care leaving nothing to chance, my answer is that the great Japanese directors work the same way. Anyway, I feel much more Japanese than American. Le Samourai is a Japanese film, as the title suggests.
The most important quality needed by a film director – or as I prefer to say, a film creator [un createur de cinema] – is the ability not to work through his intellect, otherwise he ceases to create a spectacle. He must also have a feeling for observation, memory, psychology, and a fantastically acute sense of sight and sound. He must have the instinct of a showman. A film is a spectacle, just like the circus or the music-hall; when it’s well done, it becomes a work of art. But the cinema as a whole is not an art yet – it’s going to become one. It is no accident that every writer I meet envies me my profession. Today, the cinema is the ideal form of literary creation, and young people no longer have a literary culture but a filmic one. This is something that would have seemed impossible 15 years ago.
All your heroes wear a sort of uniform: hat, raincoat, etc.
I think the virile hero needs a horse, boots and saddle. As you’ve probably noticed, they’re not exactly common on the streets of Paris, but at least you can give him a hat, a raincoat with a belt and a collar that can be turned up, and a button to do up when it rains. It’s a man’s get-up, an echo both of the Western and of military uniform. And there are the guns too, it all springs from the barrack-room. Men are soldiers, women may be by accident… Between the ages of 12 and 14 I was both formed and deformed to a great extent by the first American gangster novels. So I’d be quite happy to have you say I make gangster films, inspired by the gangster novels, but I don’t make American films, even though I like the American films noirs better than anything.
L’Aine des Ferchaux is a dream of America rather than America itself?
Of course. Starting from one of Simenon’s novels I presented a particular aspect of America that I’m rather fond of. The Americans, I might point out, decided I was very anti-American, certainly a Communist. Not that that matters. I’m very fond of America. What would be really great would be if there was no one living in it, nothing there. Because of course no one could possibly replace the Americans. The country would be like a vast museum where you could just wander around. When I made Deux Hommes a Manhattan I was writing a love letter to New York, and my story takes place at night because that is the time for writing love letters. Any story set in a big city should start at about six in the evening and end with the dawn.
Your heroes never grow old. Even when adult, they remain essentially adolescent.
That’s my own particular hang-up. I think I’m still 18 years old. Outwardly, of course, I behave like a sensible gentleman of 50, but inside I’m still 18, I haven’t changed. I think that is man’s special prerogative. Moreover my studios on the rue Jenner (which I’m going to have rebuilt) are an adolescent dream.
You are often reproached for the improbability of your heroes, who are very easy to recognise.
It’s because I don’t want to situate my heroes in time I don’t want the action of a film to be recognisable as something that happens in 1968. That’s why in Le Samourai, for example, the women aren’t wearing mini-skirts while the men are wearing hats – something, unfortunately, that no one does any more.
I’m not interested in realism. All my films hinge on the fantastic. I’m not a documentarist: a film is first and foremost a dream, and it’s absurd to copy life in an attempt to produce an exact re-creation of it. Transposition is more or less a reflex with me; I move from realism to fantasy without the spectator even noticing.
Le Samourai describes several parallel worlds which never overlap but merely brush against each other from time to time – the Delon and Perier characters in particular. Perier is a logical character, very Cartesian, very French; Delon is a mystery, a complete enigma. We don’t know who Delon is, what he used to do, where he came from, how and why he has become a hired killer.
This was deliberate on my part, because I can’t stand the sort of film which tries to place a character by having him announce “I was with the army in Indochina and later in Algeria, I used to kill for the Government’s profit and now I’m killing for myself,” etc.
From Les Enfants Terribles right up to Le Samourai, there’s a certain affinity between your work and Cocteau’s.
Jean Cocteau was one of the greatest writers France has produced in the last 50 years. You have only to read or re-read his plays, poems, novels and essays to be convinced of that.
He unquestionably had a formative influence on several generations and on mine in particular, because in 1931, when Les Enfants Terribles was first published I was a pupil at the Lycee Condorcet and I used to pass ‘the ‘cite Montier’ four times a day. That was how I discovered Cocteau’s universe.
My films are different from his but there is undeniably a certain intellectual affinity between us. That’s probably why he asked me to make Les Enfants Terribles. We had a lot of tastes in common.
I adore the beginning of Orphée, it’s wonderful, quite fantastic. The second part isn’t good, for reasons that I’d rather not go into, although it does have some very fine things in it: the tribunal, the passage from life to death through the mirror, and so on. Casares had the best role of her career in it and Perier was brilliant. As soon as I saw him in Orphée, I was determined to have him in one of my films.
You’ve made three films with Belmondo (Leon Morin, Pretre, Le Doulos and L’aine Des Ferchaux) and, up till now, only one with Delon. What do you think of these two?
They’re the only two jeunes premiers in the French cinema. So I’m forced to make comparisons, but what I say in favour of one doesn’t imply any criticism of the other. Belmondo can play parts that Delon would be incapable of playing, and vice versa. They complement one another quite admirably.
I wrote Le Samourai for Delon, with him in mind and inspired by him. Of course, if I were to write an original screenplay for Belmondo, Delon could not possibly play it. Belmondo is remarkable in Leon Morin, Pretre, and Delon in Le Samourai. Neither of them could possibly replace the other. The two films are about the same character played by very different actors. Delon is a remarkable actor, and remarkably professional.
I don’t like characters to be explained through a few ‘tics’, although Delon copied two of mine for Le Samourai – the gesture of running two fingers over the brim of his hat, and the way of wearing his watch on his right wrist with the dial turned in.
Similarly, I didn’t want to be explicit about the relationship between Delon and Nathalie. It’s of no interest to know whether they are lovers or not. Their relationship has the same ambiguity as the one between Lino Ventura and Christine Fabrega in Le Deuxieme Souffle. They could be brother and sister; it’s the ‘enfants terribles’ side of Cocteau.
Nathalie Delon is so like Elizabeth and Alain so much like Paul, it’s extraordinary how alike they look.
In Le Doulos, Le Deuxieme Souffle and Le Samourai one finds the same recurring relationship between gangster and police chief: Belmondo, Ventura and Delon as the gangsters, Desailly, Meurisse and Perier as the policemen.
For me, the police chief is Destiny. That’s how the character has to be, for he represents inescapable destiny: he doesn’t personally execute the gangster, but he does set the machinery in motion.
In the last scene of Le Samourai, Delon does not want to kill. He removes the bullets from his gun, then he goes back into the bar, into the trap which has been set for him, and he kills himself, he commits hara-kiri.
From the outset, the black woman in white is the incarnation of Death, with all the charm that death can have.
At one point in Cocteau’s Orphée, Maria Casares said “I should not mind being changed into a pillar of salt,” and her black dress became white – and, for Cocteau, Casares represented Death. The character of Jeff Costello (Alain Delon) in Le Samourai is in love with his own Death. In the first shot he’s stretched out on his bed, already ‘laid out’, already dead at that moment, and everything follows.
After the success of Le Samourai, you have several projects lined up, and right now you’re preparing La Chienne, a remake of Jean Renoir’s 1931 film and of Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street (1945).
It will not be a remake. There’s an idea in the original book that interests me, and that’s all.
The film I shall probably make from La Chienne will be nothing like the novel and still less like the films by Renoir and Lang.
Both these films were made from an adaptation written by Mouezy-Eon, and not from the original book by La Fourchardiere. (As you may know, because Mouezy-Eon acted as an intermediary in the sale of the rights to Braunberger and Richebe in 1931, his name has to appear on the credits of any film based on La Chienne by La Fourchardiere.)
I should very much like to do it with Lino Ventura. What interests me is the principle behind the original book which, in its introductory note, describes the characters as “He, she and the other, the eternal triangle.” But my characters will be nothing like those in the novel. ‘He’ is an extremely timid person who opens the first chapter with the words “Tonight, something happened to me … ” I shall keep this sentence in my film, but instead of continuing, “It’s the first time in my life that anything has happened to me,” he will say “Although God knows enough has happened to me already…”
You see, I’m turning someone who’s essentially a victim – like Professor Rath in The Blue Angel, for instance – into a man who’s tough, who has been through it all, possibly an ex-gangster or a nightclub owner, I’m not sure. In any case, he will be the kind of man you can’t easily imagine falling in love at first sight, or with an average sort of girl.
What interests me is that ‘he’ narrates the first sequence, ‘she’ narrates the second sequence, ‘the other’ the third, and then the cycle starts all over again. Each character describes things from his own point of view – describing not the same scene, but the next one in sequence.
That’s how I envisage my version of La Chienne. If I don’t start it right away, I may make a spy film from a novel called The Packard Case. If it comes off the way I hope, it will be the kind of film that should have been made from John Le Carre’s excellent book The Spy Who Came In From the Cold. That’s one remake I’d be happy to do, for I found Martin Ritt’s film really very bad and rather grotesque.
______________ Jean-Pierre Melville’s 14 films
______________ 24 Hours in the Life of a Clown (1946) ‘The movie follows the clock round as music hall clown Beby takes off his make up, goes home for a meal, looks at photos and goes to bed to rise, spend a day in the village and perform with his new partner. The directorial debut of a legend and you get exactly what is billed. It’s very charming and light hearted.’— James Betsalel
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______________ Le Silence de la mer (1949) ‘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 (Leon Morin, Priest; Army of Shadows) yet remains a singularly eerie masterwork in its own right.’ — The Criterion Collection
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Ginette Vincendeau on Le Silence de la mer
_____________ Les Enfants Terribles (1950) ‘Writer Jean Cocteau and director Jean-Pierre Melville joined forces for this elegant adaptation of Cocteau’s immensely popular, wicked novel about the wholly unholy relationship between a brother and sister. Elisabeth (a remarkable Nicole Stéphane) and Paul (Edouard Dermithe) close themselves off from the world by playing an increasingly intense series of mind games with the people who dare enter their lair—until romance and jealousy intrude. Melville’s operatic camera movements and Cocteau’s perverse, poetic approach to character merge in Les enfants terribles to create one of French cinema’s greatest, and most surprising, meetings of the minds.’ — The Criterion Collection
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_____________ When You Read This Letter (1953) ‘Quand tu liras cette lettre (When You Read This Letter) possesses an unfavorable reputation with even his most ardent admirers. The film was not only, by the director’s own admission, an impersonal project that enabled him to fund his own studio in Paris, but was also produced within the often-disparaged commercial industry of the period: an international co-production between Jad Films and Société Générale de Cinématographie in Paris and Titanus-Dauria in Rome. In his book-length interview with Rui Nogueira in 1971, Melville dismisses his involvement with this Jacques Deval-scripted melodrama as an attempt to be taken seriously within France’s commercial industry, which viewed him suspiciously as an “amateur, even a dilettante”, with the artistic pretensions of an “intellectual.”’— Senses of Cinema
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______________ Bob le flambeur (1956) ‘Jean-Pierre Melville’s “Bob le Flambeur” (1955) has a good claim to be the first film of the French New Wave. Daniel Cauchy, who stars in it as Paolo, Bob’s callow young friend, remembered that Melville would shoot scenes on location using a handheld camera on a delivery bike, “which Godard did in ‘Breathless,’ but this was years before Godard.” Melville worked on poverty row, and told his actors there was no money to pay them, but that they would have to stand by to shoot on a moment’s notice. “Right now I have money for three or four days,” he told Cauchy, “and after that we’ll shoot when we can.”
‘This film was legendary but unseen for years, and Melville’s career is only now coming into focus. He shot gangster movies, he worked in genres, but he had such a precise, elegant simplicity of style that his films play like the chamber music of crime. He was cool in the 1950s sense of that word. His characters in “Bob” glide through gambling dens and nightclubs “in those moments,” Melville tells us in the narration, “between night and day … between heaven and hell.”‘— Roger Ebert
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_____________ Two Men in Manhattan (1958) ‘A French UN delegate has disappeared into thin air, sending reporter Moreau (Jean-Pierre Melville) and hard drinking photographer Delmas (Pierre Grasset) on an assignment to find him. Their only lead is a picture of three women. Set against a smoky jazz score and featuring stunning black and white cinematography that beautifully captures the gritty streets at night, this is director Melville’s love letter to New York City and homage to American Film Noir.’— eOne
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Jonathan Rosenbaum analyzes TWO MEN IN MANHATTAN
______________ Léon Morin, Priest (1961) ‘In 1961, reeling from the failure of his U.S.-set thriller Two Men in Manhattan and resolved to break with his image as a cult director “known only to a handful of crazy film buffs,” Jean-Pierre Melville signed to adapt and direct this film version of Béatrix Beck’s acclaimed roman à clef about her life in a French provincial village during and just after the Occupation. He chose the ravishing Emmanuelle Riva (fresh off Hiroshima Mon Amour) to play Beck’s surrogate, an atheistic widow who saunters into the local church with the goal of making a mockery of the place. But Melville himself, who knew the real Beck, would later say he most closely identified with the eponymous man of the cloth (Jean-Paul Belmondo), who rather than taking offense at Riva’s outré claims, offers her compassionate counsel and attempted conversion–a personal attention she is not alone in receiving among the village’s single, man-hungry women.’ — Film at Lincoln Center
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_______________ Le Doulos (1962) ‘The backstabbing criminals in the shadowy underworld of Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le doulos have only one guiding principle: “Lie or die.” A stone-faced Jean-Paul Belmondo stars as enigmatic gangster Silien, who may or may not be responsible for squealing on Faugel (Serge Reggiani), just released from the slammer and already involved in what should have been a simple heist. By the end of this brutal, twisting, and multilayered policier, who will be left to trust? Shot and edited with Melville’s trademark cool and featuring masterfully stylized dialogue and performances, Le doulos (slang for “informant”) is one of the filmmaker’s most gripping crime dramas.’ — The Criterion Collection
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_______________ Magnet of Doom (1963) ‘Two bouts, one in a Gallic boxing ring and the other in a Louisiana swamp, and the road between them. The failed prizefighter is a former paratrooper (Jean-Paul Belmondo), he answers a newspaper ad and finds himself in an airplane to America next to the corrupt banker (Charles Vanel), “an old oak tree who wanted to be called godfather.” Secretary, bodyguard, surrogate son, the roles multiply as they reach New York and head south, though not before a solemn visit to Frank Sinatra’s birthplace in Hoboken. “Fate had decided. I could only watch in the rear-view mirror.” Simenon according to Jean-Pierre Melville, or Deux hommes dans Manhattan expanded in Decaë color and Francoscope, a reverie of the New World. A predatory philosophy (“Sheep, leopards and jackals”) is the same on either side of the ocean, the pearly Oldsmobile Cutlass is posed next to roadside diners and crimson gas pumps in acute Ruscha compositions. Drive by the George Washington National Forest and who but Stefania Sandrelli turns up as a hitchhiker in a Shirley MacLaine ‘do—the camera cranes over the trees by the peebly riverbank and suddenly it’s a Delmer Daves western, complete with a harmonica theme by Georges Delerue. (A valiseful of dollar bills is dumped off the side of a cliff to curtail the interlude.) Feds with extradition papers, rockabilly GIs by the jukebox, nods to The Set-Up and Citizen Kane and Some Came Running, toothpaste commercials on the motel telly. New Orleans is the final stop, with a Cinecittà starlet in blue plumes at the nightclub and a fateful scuffle in a bayou shack. “California champagne,” Belmondo shrugs. The joke is that this excursion into Yankee territory is envisioned largely inside a Parisian studio, with location glimpses only adding to the hallucinatory effect of wide open spaces as inescapably entrapping as Melville’s noir labyrinths. A key transitional work, overlooked even by the director’s buffs yet understood at once by Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, Kings of the Road…’— FernandoFCroce
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_______________ Le Deuxieme Souffle (1966) ‘With his customary restraint and ruthless attention to detail, director Jean-Pierre Melville follows the parallel tracks of French underworld criminal Gu (the inimitable Lino Ventura), escaped from prison and roped into one last robbery, and the suave inspector, Blot (Paul Meurisse), relentlessly seeking him. The implosive Le deuxième souffle captures the pathos, loneliness, and excitement of a life in the shadows with methodical suspense and harrowing authenticity, and contains one of the most thrilling heist sequences Melville ever shot.’— The Criterion Collection
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______________ Le Samouraï (1967) ‘In a career-defining performance, Alain Delon plays Jef Costello, a contract killer with samurai instincts. After carrying out a flawlessly planned hit, Jef finds himself caught between a persistent police investigator and a ruthless employer, and not even his armor of fedora and trench coat can protect him. An elegantly stylized masterpiece of cool by maverick director Jean‑Pierre Melville, Le samouraï is a razor-sharp cocktail of 1940s American gangster cinema and 1960s French pop culture—with a liberal dose of Japanese lone-warrior mythology.’— The Criterion Collection
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_____________ Army of Shadows (1969) ‘Never trust the critics. When it was first released a year after the convulsions of May 1968, Jean-Pierre Melville’s inky wartime masterwork Army of Shadows was widely dismissed by French cinephiles, damned as suspiciously Gaullist. At half a century’s distance, you wonder if writers were wrongfooted too by the raw gravity of what they had seen.
‘Then, as now, thoughts of Melville led to images of trenchcoats and smoking revolvers, the fun stuff of the low-life crime dramas that made his name. Here instead was a cold, mournful study of the Resistance, occupied France heavy with the taint of Vichy. Watch it a hundred times and the dread, bad-dream opening sequence of Nazi troops swarming through the Arc de Triomphe might still leave you reeling, one of cinema’s greatest horror choreographies. It could hardly be a better introduction to what follows, the scattered campaigns of a handful of guerrilla fighters led by the relentless Philippe Gerbier (Lino Ventura).
‘While Melville had a distaste for films that drew from their makers’ own lives, here it was unavoidable — much of his own war was spent in the Resistance. The filter was the dramatised memoir of another fighter, Joseph Kessel, giving the script a just-the-facts bristle. But the director’s noir history was not wholly abandoned. What was the Resistance, after all, if not a noble underworld, thick with subterfuge, dotted with safe houses?
‘The novelty — it still has few equals in this — was the atmosphere of radical uncertainty, characters moving from scene to scene with death only ever half a step behind. Melville’s other glorious films (several currently available in the UK on the streaming service Mubi) would be more of a morale booster, but Army of Shadows speaks most clearly to the nature of 2020 — no end yet in sight and fate unknowable.’— Danny Leigh
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Cinematographer Pierre Lhomme on “Army of Shadows”
______________ Le Cercle Rouge (1970) ‘In this film, working with his cinematographer, Henri Decae, Melville takes us along for a ride through the streets of Paris that shows the vibrant city mainly at night and the bleak winter in France. The score is by Eric Demarsan that emphasizes a jazzy music that accompanies most of the action.
‘Although the film shows Alain Delon, as Corey, at the center of the action, it is however, the smart inspector Mattei who is the real hero of the movie. As played by the great Bourvil, he is a man that shows a lot of patience because he has figured from the beginning how to catch Vogel, and in the process he gets involved in the investigation of the jewel heist in which he knows the escaped man he is tailing looms large behind it. Bourvil gives an enormously satisfying performance as Mattei showing equal parts of determination and tenderness, as it’s the case with the three cats he adores.
‘Alain Delon always responded with interesting performances his appearances in Mellville’s pictures. In here he is Corey, the man who is first seen leaving prison and promising himself he won’t go back, but he cannot pass a good thing when he decides to go ahead and participate in the robbery. His association with Vogel and Jansen, pays off in the way they get the job done, but it will also prove a mistake in the way they will not be able to dispose of the loot as the fence they have relied on has a change of heart.’— jotix100
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Jean-Pierre Melville tourne “Le Cercle Rouge”
___________ Un Flic (1972) ‘Haunted by death-obsessed men of action, Un Flic (A Cop) is a fitting final act for noir master Jean-Pierre Melville, who died in 1973, a year after this production. The title suggests that film is about Edouard Coleman, Alain Delon’s weary policeman, but the true subject is Coleman’s age. These characters are all worn down by time, and while that doesn’t make them sentimental or sloppy, they are always aware that any screw-up could get them killed. The balletic opening bank heist, a precise, dialogue-free set piece where deferred stares speak louder than the roaring of waves rolling in at a nearby beach, happens at twilight, but the metallic sky looming overhead makes it impossible to be sure of the time of day. After this robbery, a group of thieves led by Simon (Richard Crenna) plan their next job, and Edouard follows them. Meanwhile, a love triangle between Edouard, his mistress, Cathy (Catherine Deneuve), Simon, her lover, takes center stage. Their uneasy relationship is at an impasse: At the bars, they sip Scotch, and warily exchange sidelong glances. Feelings are a liability in Un Flic, so Delon’s heartsick detective always looks vaguely distracted, his eyes betraying the character’s sadness. At the end, his partner fidgets while Edouard, trapped in his own head, drives down the Champs-Élysées. The other cop knows he can’t do anything for Edouard, except maybe offer a stick of gum. Un Flic‘s Paris is purgatory; the city’s silvery-blue, halogen-lit miasma is a fact of life.’— Simon Abrams
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p.s. Hey. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. I can’t remember owning any masks, although I surely did, but I love mask shopping. There are few things more exciting to me than seeing a whole wall covered with dozens and dozens of Halloween masks. New Play Therapy! You’re on fire! Everyone, Delight incarnate at the arrival of the new episode of _Black_Acrylic’s sonically pumping Play Therapy radio show/podcast packed with ‘Italo Disco, Electro, Dancehall and much more besides’. Jump to your feet or check the sturdiness of the legs on your chair then click this and then click again where indicated. ** David Ehrenstein, Those are some very nice masks indeed. And those some awfully mature looking school girls. ** Sypha, Ah, cool. Memory tells me that ‘The Tenant’ is one of Polanski’s best films. ** Bill, That really is just classic, stereotypic British snobbishness on full display right there. Yes, the film of ‘The Caretaker’ is excellent! Everyone, Psst, d.l. Bill passes along the news that Clive Donner’s great film of Harold Pinter’s play ‘The Caretaker’ is viewable in full complete with excellent visual quality on youtube right here. Happy about your anti-surge and ‘prayers’ that it holds. All signs over here are that we’ll need as much luck getting our numbers down as possible. Thanks. ** Steve Erickson, That’s, of course, strange and unsettling about your eyes. Hopes/assumption that it’s just part of the process or resulting from that side effect you mention. Hadn’t heard of ‘Synchronic’ before. Well, the premise is an enticement, for sure, but that doesn’t sound very must-see. Hm. ** Okay. The blog puts its limited resources at the behest of Jean Pierre-Melville’s body of film work this weekend, and I hope your boats are floated. See you on Monday.
Now available in North America 