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Army of shadows (1969) - Melville
Band of brothers
The set-up? A portrait of a small cluster of resistance fighters in France during the German occupation.
Everything in this film seems slightly skewed from what it should be and mildly disorienting. The opening shot establishes this perfectly: soldiers parading past the Arc de triomphe in the distance and marching towards the camera ... they turn out to be German instead of French soldiers.
When Phillippe Gerbier (Lino Ventura) arrives in the---as the French policeman escorting him refers to as the "creme de la creme" of concentration camps; he's ushered into the camp commander's office for a meet and greet. As he reads Gerbier's file, we hear his thoughts and the totalitarian mind set: he's immediately wary ... that Gerbier has made it to the confines of his little barbed wire hostel warrants careful attention. If he was just a simple hooligan he would have been taken out and shot already. He was put on trial, but it was dismissed for lack of evidence? In a totalitarian regime, You simply fabricate the evidence or to inform the judge what his decision will be: this means he's got friends in very high places. How high? His superiors? Mistakes can happen, it's not unheard of a man wrongly accused rising through the echelons, maybe one day in the future, he or one of his close friends could be his boss, so he needs to tread protect himself from him. Then the essential question: Are they setting him up? Is this a test? He devises his own test, sending Gerbier into a barracks divided between loud mouths and political aware prisoners and seeing which side of the barracks he will be gravitate towards.
The funny thing is ... the camp commander was right in his suspicions. When Gerbier's dossier draws a red flag down the line not long afterwards; the Gestapo arrives to personally escort him for more intensive information retrieval center. The camp commander is right there, for all to see (subtly claiming the credit) when he's handed over.
Nice things? The film pulls the curtain aside to peek inside their morose day to day existence and anonymous sacrifice. The figures tend to be dwarfed by the spaces around them. Lonely figures walking down empty country roads. Prisoners sitting against the walls in stone cells or slumped in a chair in the center of a spacious office.
The look of the film is just plain gorgeous, that kind of grayish blue filter over everything that kind of parallels the constant tension in the film which makes the time period of the film seem longer time wise then it really is, the film basically takes place during that single metaphorical season, the dead of winter.
There's no visceral kick to the film; most of their actions are internal house keeping chores, maintaining secure lines of command and supply. When they are called to take up arms, it's unglamorous and unemotional, it's also neither vengeful or heroic, just surviving to live one more day. The film is actually a great contrast to the current wave of black Op action films, where the hero has been completely lobotomized of any kind of political or moral thought through their extensive military training.
Gerbier comments late in the film that a second wave of Maquis is springing up that needs organizing. The constant ads for career advancement and great wealth in Germany is slowly being revealed for the big lie that it is. It's not until the end of the movie, at the beginning of 1943 that the Vichy Government beings forcibly shipping able bodied men to Germany as slave labor which creates the last great wave of resistance fighters---but those individuals have been spurred into action through self-interest. Whereas the men and women in this film, are the vanguard. Whether they be short order cooks or engineers who have simply read the newspaper and realized that the situation is bad and getting worse, not just for them, but everybody and they band together to fight for the common good.
Band of brothers
The set-up? A portrait of a small cluster of resistance fighters in France during the German occupation.
Everything in this film seems slightly skewed from what it should be and mildly disorienting. The opening shot establishes this perfectly: soldiers parading past the Arc de triomphe in the distance and marching towards the camera ... they turn out to be German instead of French soldiers.
When Phillippe Gerbier (Lino Ventura) arrives in the---as the French policeman escorting him refers to as the "creme de la creme" of concentration camps; he's ushered into the camp commander's office for a meet and greet. As he reads Gerbier's file, we hear his thoughts and the totalitarian mind set: he's immediately wary ... that Gerbier has made it to the confines of his little barbed wire hostel warrants careful attention. If he was just a simple hooligan he would have been taken out and shot already. He was put on trial, but it was dismissed for lack of evidence? In a totalitarian regime, You simply fabricate the evidence or to inform the judge what his decision will be: this means he's got friends in very high places. How high? His superiors? Mistakes can happen, it's not unheard of a man wrongly accused rising through the echelons, maybe one day in the future, he or one of his close friends could be his boss, so he needs to tread protect himself from him. Then the essential question: Are they setting him up? Is this a test? He devises his own test, sending Gerbier into a barracks divided between loud mouths and political aware prisoners and seeing which side of the barracks he will be gravitate towards.
The funny thing is ... the camp commander was right in his suspicions. When Gerbier's dossier draws a red flag down the line not long afterwards; the Gestapo arrives to personally escort him for more intensive information retrieval center. The camp commander is right there, for all to see (subtly claiming the credit) when he's handed over.
Nice things? The film pulls the curtain aside to peek inside their morose day to day existence and anonymous sacrifice. The figures tend to be dwarfed by the spaces around them. Lonely figures walking down empty country roads. Prisoners sitting against the walls in stone cells or slumped in a chair in the center of a spacious office.
The look of the film is just plain gorgeous, that kind of grayish blue filter over everything that kind of parallels the constant tension in the film which makes the time period of the film seem longer time wise then it really is, the film basically takes place during that single metaphorical season, the dead of winter.
There's no visceral kick to the film; most of their actions are internal house keeping chores, maintaining secure lines of command and supply. When they are called to take up arms, it's unglamorous and unemotional, it's also neither vengeful or heroic, just surviving to live one more day. The film is actually a great contrast to the current wave of black Op action films, where the hero has been completely lobotomized of any kind of political or moral thought through their extensive military training.
Gerbier comments late in the film that a second wave of Maquis is springing up that needs organizing. The constant ads for career advancement and great wealth in Germany is slowly being revealed for the big lie that it is. It's not until the end of the movie, at the beginning of 1943 that the Vichy Government beings forcibly shipping able bodied men to Germany as slave labor which creates the last great wave of resistance fighters---but those individuals have been spurred into action through self-interest. Whereas the men and women in this film, are the vanguard. Whether they be short order cooks or engineers who have simply read the newspaper and realized that the situation is bad and getting worse, not just for them, but everybody and they band together to fight for the common good.