The theatrical re-release and distribution of “Army of Shadows” last year no doubt provided a many younger, American cinema lovers with their first exposure to the work of French director Jean-Pierre Melville. Earlier this year, I managed to find and screen a VHS copy of Melville’s “The Silence of the Sea” (“Le Silence de la Mer”), a film that has been sitting atop my annual list of favorite film experiences for most of the year. With Eureka’s Masers of Cinema label now releasing this title on DVD, it seemed like an opportune time to revisit the film and see if it stood up to a second viewing. It did.

Made in 1949 but set in 1941, the film focuses on an elderly French man and his niece who are forced to house a German officer, Werner von Ebrennac, in their home during the occupation of their country. They give the man the silent treatment, and the bulk of the film consists of the monologues spoken by the German officer in their presence. Ironically, he turns out to be a bit of a Francophile whose father’s hatred of the nation that defeated him in World War I couldn’t quite crush his own appreciation for the literary and philosophical achievements of the country he fights but doesn’t hate.

“The Silence of the Sea” makes an excellent companion film to “Army of Shadows.” On the surface the latter film has more scope; the concentrated focus and narrow setting might make the former appear to be more of a melodrama than a philosophical work of art. It may well have turned into that in lesser hands. The French uncle’s first major speech, however, introduces a key philosophical theme that permeates the film and helps give is a philosophical complexity that most melodramas lack: “My niece and I tacitly agreed not to change our lives even in the slightest detail…as if the officer didn’t exist, as if he were an apparition. But another feeling may have slipped into my heart. It hurts me to offend a man even if he be my enemy.”

It is significant that the narrator expresses his reservations about his conduct early in the film, before we (or he) might be psychologically influenced by the officer’s behavior. The reservation he is expressing is based on his own morals for how another should be treated based on that other’s status as a human being, not on treatment or respect another has earned because of his beliefs or behavior. Here “The Silence of the Sea” shares with “Army of Shadows” a concern for the psychological and spiritual price that war extracts on human beings in addition to its physical costs. Battles are remote in both films: in “Silence” we get only a quick flashback of von Ebrennac in a tank, shelling Chartres; in “Army of Shadows” we get a scene of a resistance fighter having to jump out of a plane into the seemingly endless void beneath him. The spectacle-like carnage viewers have grown hardened to in more contemporary military action films is not present in these films. What is present is the effect that having to commit violence has on the human soul. The resistance fighters in “Army of Shadows” must kill a collaborator with their bear hands, and his death is slow and messy.  In “Silence of the Sea,” when von Ebrennac fires on Chartres, we see his face, not his target, and we are forced to measure the damage done not just to the victim but also to the aggressor.

The fact that this German officer is depicted with anything approaching sympathy is remarkable given that the film was made in 1949. There is, perhaps, some truth to the argument that von Ebernaac is a bit of a straw man, designed to give speeches glorifying French culture that could appear self-congratulatory or hollow coming from the occupied citizens. The conceit works, though, because other Germans are portrayed as zealous, tyrannical, and violent. As von Ebernnac realizes his army’s and nation’s intentions for their defeated foes are far more brutal and sinister than his own, his isolation and helplessness ironically mirrors that of the French people with whom he identifies in so many other areas. Ironically, too, the very qualities of sensitivity and humanity that make him susceptible to the sort of psychological resistance provided by the French are ones that make him ill equipped to resist the fascist thinking that has overtaken his own country. His despair is a victory of sorts for the French resistors, but it leaves them to deal only with the hardened hearts of less sympathetic men who will replace him.

During a two week leave in Paris, the German officer reads captions on monuments commemorating Napoleon’ s march into Vienna and Joan of Arc’s campaign to fight the English, and he realizes that wars do not last forever, nor do the consequences they bring. The human spirit—its thoughts, dreams, aspirations, particularly as embodied in its art—has a much better chance of living a thousand years than does any reich. It is because the human soul is immortal that the greatest violence done in war is that which we inflict upon it. As von Ebernaac, still aghast at descriptions of the Treblinka death camp, relates the changes that have come over his countrymen and a particular former companion, he laments how easy it is for the rhetoric of obligation and nationalism to muffle the cries of our own souls protesting against that for which we know we were not made: “Happy is he who can find with such certainty the path to duty. At the crossroads you hear: ‘Take this route!’ But you can’t see the route climb to the shining high points. It goes down into a gloomy valley, plunges into the stinking darkness of a grim forest. Oh, God! Show me where my duty lies!”

“The Silence of the Sea” does not glorify the French resistance nor excuse the German army. Instead it laments the soul-destroying effects of violence, whether it comes wrapped in justifications of patriotic duty or self-righteous claims of self defense. “It hurts me to offend a man even if he be my enemy.” It is at the point where it no longer hurts us to hurt our enemy that we have become too accustomed to violence and need to start being afraid not just of those who can kill the body (Matthew 10:28).

My enemy is, after all, still a man.

Isn’t he?

8 July 2007