black out
by Douglas Messerli
Jean-Pierre Melville (screenwriter,
based on a novel by Joseph Kessel, and director) L’armée des ombres (Army of
Shadows) / 1969
Jean-Pierre Melville’s intense drama of the French Resistance during the early years of World War II begins with the arrestment of Philippe Gerbier (Lina Ventura)—leader of a network of Resistance workers in Marseille—a scene filled with ironies that extend to the entire film after. Gerbier is seen by the Vichy government as possibility a De Gaullist, but they, clearly, are unaware of his position, so they put him in a relatively empty camp built originally for German prisoners. Three of the prisoners with whom he must share quarters are ridiculous fools, men arrested for various infractions that have little to do with commitment to the French cause. The other two men are Communists, one a former teacher who is dying and the other a young electrician who is devoted to his dying friend and apparently his male lover. When the friend dies, the young electrician, in charge of the camp’s power plant, confesses to Gerbier his plan to escape. The two are about to accomplish that escape, but Gerbier is again taken into custody for an inquiry in Paris by the Nazi superiors. While waiting for the meeting, he and another man make their escape, and Gerbier returns to his fellow workers.
With Lepercq’s recruitment of an old, risk-loving former pilot friend, Jean-François Jardie (Jean-Pierre Cassel) and his assignment to deliver up a transmitter to a housewife in the underground, Mathilde (Simone Signoret), we now have met almost all of the secret Resistance workers—except the very head of the organization, who turns out to be Jardie’s philosopher brother, who lives in what appears to be a removed life in a Paris mansion. Even the younger Jardie has no idea of his brother’s role.
In short, nobody in this film is who he appears to be, not even, at
moments, to their own knowledge of themselves. Driven by a cause larger than
themselves, they must act as pawns in a larger game, jumping from planes
without any lessons in parachuting, helping their own kind to escape from
impossible situations when they are arrested, and killing members of their own
network when it appears they might be likely to provide information. Some of
their undertakings, moreover, work at odds with the others of their group.
When Gerbier is again arrested, Mathilde and others plot a remarkable
escape, based on their knowledge that as he and others are about to be shot,
the SS officer’s play a sadistic game of forcing them to run like scarred
rabbits. Gerbier, who at first refuses to play along, is almost shot, but when
he finally does run, is miraculously saved.
Yet soon after Mathilde herself is arrested, and, since the Nazi’s have
taken in her daughter, she is no longer to be trusted; Gerbier has no choice
but to order Mathilde to be killed.
By film’s end, we realize that within
another year of the occupation, all of these figures have died or committed
suicide.
Despite their heroic actions,
accordingly, they have little effect. The Maquis, by film’s end, seem to have
become more successful than the complex machinations of these underground
warriors.
Although Melville filmed in color, the hues of his scenes are so dark
that we often perceive the images as being in black and white. After each
sequence, moreover, the camera goes black for what appear to be longer and
longer periods, as if to suggest that the characters and the viewer are moving
down a dark tunnel where any possible vision of reality becomes increasingly
unreliable.
At one moment, while visiting Britain in order to request materials and
funds, Gerbier is caught on the street during a black out and, momentarily,
seems unable to know where to turn. Through a small crack of light, coming from
a nearby window, he perceives there is action within, and he enters to find
that, despite the dangerous and deadened world outside, the room is filled with
young soldiers, sailors, and uniformed women dancing as if nothing were wrong
with the world. But it is, we quickly perceive, a kind of joyless dance, a
dance of death.
Bravery, cunning, love, and violence in Army of Shadows all seem meaningless, since no action, no matter
how committed to purpose (or how existentialist) the actor might be, can save
anyone’s life. Even if one might survive the horrible world in which they are
trapped and tortured, the survivors are hunted down and destroyed by their
kind.
The bleak view represented in this film was apparently unperceived upon
its original showing, when French critics took it to task for glorifying
Charles de Gaulle, a highly unpopular position given the ravages of the
Algerian War. And the film was not released in the U.S. for nearly 40 years.
Thank heaven for the restoration and re-release in 2006, as well as its DVD
appearance in the Criterion collection.
Los Angeles, March 23, 2015
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2015).
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