Here’s a draft of an article I wrote for the May 5th issue of The Forward. I will post a link once it appears.  

 “A film-maker must be a witness of his times,” the great French director Jean-Pierre Melville, acknowledged as the grandfather of the French New Wave said in a 1971 interview while discussing his 1968 film about the French Resistance, “Army of Shadows.” The film is having its long-overdue American premiere in a limited engagement at the Film Forum beginning April 28th.  In addition to being a neglected masterwork by one of the world’s major filmmakers, “Army” is one of the first cinematic depictions of an occupation that left a stain of the French national consciousness.

“The French population during World War II was comprised of resisters, collaborators, indifferent observers and many frightened citizen,” says Professor Annette Insdorf, noted Holocaust film historian and Director of Undergraduate Film Studies at Columbia University. She classes “Army of Shadows” as one on the French films that have “depicted the spectrum of behavior in intriguing ways” and places it alongside such films as Louis Malle’s “Lacombe Lucien,” Truffaut’s “Last Metro” and Joseph Losey’s “Mr. Klein.”
   
“Army of Shadows” is also a fascinating compliment to Marcel Ophuls’ “The Sorrow and the Pity,” which was also released in 1969. But if the message of “Army” is similar, the tone and feel of the film is completely other.  In this work, Melville constructs a gloomy existentialist set piece of espionage that details the Sisyphusian heroism of the partisans in the face of certain defeat. Melville’s resistance fighters are not all that different from the loners that inhabit the noirish worlds of “Le Samouri” and “Le Cercle Rouge.” “It’s a powerful elegy for members of the French resistance, presented with understatement and a meditative pace that lets us think about what is happening,” Professor Insdorf adds.

For Melville, who was born Jean-Pierre Grumbach to a Jewish family in Alsace, served in WWII and was himself a member of the Resistance, the film had profound personal significance. As a veteran of Free France, he wanted to pay tribute to the brave men and women whose courage in the face of occupation was repaid with death; and as a French Jew, he felt a certain sense of duty to collapse the myth of a mass unified front against the Nazi occupation. The film opened in France to weak box-office receipts and the critical reaction to film was mixed, with certain Cahiers du cinema accusing him of making “Gaullist film art” and others of portraying the resistance fighters like gangsters.

“Army of Shadows” is singular in Melville’s oeuvre as a document of the artist’s experience: “For the first time in this film I show things I have known and experienced.” Still, Melville stressed that the film was not to be taken as the whole truth. “Nevertheless my truth, of course, is subjective and has nothing to do with actual truth.” For instance, he claimed he had no intention of making a film about the Resistance. “So with one exception – the German occupation – I excluded all realism.” Perhaps in his determination not to make a “picturesque” film about the war, the finished product verges on abstraction. Melville calls it “a film which wasn’t intended to be abstract, but happened to turn out that way.”
 
The one place where Melville strove to be realistic was in portraying the German Occupation. This shows particularly in opening scenes where the main character is interred briefly in a French concentration camp. Melville actually filmed those scenes in a former concentration-camp that was partially reconstructed for the film. But outside of this commitment to historical accuracy in portraying the occupation, Melville did not aim to make a film about the French resistance. The France of 1969 was not ready for such a film: “A lot of people would have to be dead before one could make a true film about the Resistance.”

At the same time, however, Melville articulated the fascination with the World War II era that would occupy some of the brightest lights in French film of the emerging generation throughout the 70’s and 80’s:  “When I think of everything that happened in those days, I’m amazed that the French don’t make more films about the period.”