One Shot is a series that seeks to find an essence of cinema history in one single image of a movie.
Jean-Pierre Melville’s Army of Shadows (1969) welcomes the unhappy memories of Vichy France. The movie unfolds like a living diary, mostly from the perspective of the sturdy Phillipe Gerbier (Lino Ventura), a member of the French resistance. It puts before us, among other things, the individual costs that are meant to be paid to the collective. Paul Dounat (Alain Libolt) is a traitor who is to be punished for his treachery. On the face of it this punishment is a righteous act performed by the committed heroic forces. But his murder by the resistance sequence flips that notion. When La Masque (Claude Mann), a young member of the execution party, berates the traitor for his actions we realize that Dounat is but a kid who hardly fits his coat. And this noble deed is to be carried out by a group, which isn’t a dedicated war machine adept at this task, but a set of individuals who are forced to carry out this ugly work. They have never done this before, and grope in the dark at all possible ways of doing away with Paul after they run into a roadblock in their preparations. The scene reinforces that there is no romance in a war/revolution. Dounat, who doesn’t utter a single word through the sequence, has to be sacrificed at the altar of justice. The others have to go through with this, even if it is against their will. The group tries to mask the deed by treating it as a mere job but soon the façade is over. In absence of any other method, they have to strangle Paul. It isn’t easy, and it shows on their faces. By the end, La Masque’s novice exuberance has converted into a tearful apology. Even Gerbier, the only one with clarity of thought, reminding La Masque of his karma and directing the action, is affected by the killing. The lessons from this sequence will show up later in the film, such as when the leadership convinces the unsure members of the absolute necessity to get rid of another suspected traitor, even if she had once been their group’s backbone and might have collaborated against her will. Gerbier would continue to be a pensive yet adept leader, finding ways out of tough situations till he refuses to run. And some would learn that it’s better to extinguish oneself for a misstep in their line of work, than to suffer a brutal fate from their foes or one of their own. What isn’t repeated is the hollowness and guilt that is felt after Paul Donaut’s death. The young man loses his life, while the participants feel as if they have been corrupted. The task they set out at the beginning of the day was to execute a traitor; what some didn’t know was that the deed, though informed by their hate and quest for justice, would naturally entail the act of murdering another human being. By the time Paul breathes his last, each perpetrator has lost a bit of himself.