Description
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 Decae¨, with hushed eloquence, Le silence de la mer points the way toward Melville’s later films about resistance and the occupation (Le´on Morin, Priest; Army of Shadows) yet remains a singularly eerie masterwork in its own right.
Special Features
- New high-definition digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
- The short 24 Hours in the Life of a Clown (1946), director Jean-Pierre Melville’s first film
- New interview with film scholar Ginette Vincendeau
- Code Name Melville (2008), a seventy-six-minute documentary on Melville’s time in the French Resistance and his films about it
- Melville Steps Out of the Shadows (2010), a forty-two-minute documentary about Le silence de la mer
- Interview with Melville from 1959
- New English subtitle translation
- PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by critic Geoffrey O’Brien and a selection from Rui Nogueira’s 1971 book Melville on Melville
