Critics reviews

Melville announced in his first feature, the ultra-eerie Le Silence de la mer (which was based partly on his wartime experiences), an approach which emphasized silence, temps morts, suspense that is metaphysical or spiritual, a modernist sense of visual composition that emphasizes the psychological dimensions of space, and (anticipating Bresson) the strange nature of everyday objects and gestures.

The old man's voice-over narration is incantatory; once the lieutenant begins showing up each night in civilian clothes to continue what his host mentally characterizes as "the long rhapsody of his discovery of France," the movie is powerfully repetitive.

The black-and-white cinematography, by the wonderful Henri Decaë, is starkly atmospheric. Melville's fascination with Orson Welles's "Citizen Kane" (1941) is evident in some striking shots, and he used low-budget tricks, such as a dissolve that joins a shot of Chartres Cathedral with a tank's cannon filmed in Paris.

With no outward scenes of extreme hardship, and certainly no scenes of large-scale suffering and violence, the film sustains an atmosphere of deprivation and darkness throughout its length. With the help of its three central performers—the Swiss actor Howard Vernon as von Ebrennac, Jean-Marie Robain as the unnamed uncle, and Nicole Stéphane (star of Melville's subsequent Les enfants terribles) as the niece—a deeper level of emotional estrangement and desperation is made quietly apparent.

[Melville] knew exactly what he was doing... Once it becomes clear that the uncle and the niece are going to remain (almost) entirely silent for the duration of the movie, Melville's unconventional use of voiceover narration makes a lot more sense. Von Ebrennac's self-conscious torrent of verbiage needs to be balanced by the uncle's interior monologue, and that monologue needs to be as matter-of-fact as Von Ebrennac's lengthy speeches are abstract and idealistic.

Taking literary inspiration to ends that shatter what would be termed "cinéma de papa" by the writers at Cahiers du Cinéma in subsequent years, Le Silence de la Mer suggests a conscious break on Melville's part from the kinds of "quality" cinema that exemplified bourgeois film interests in the decades prior.

On a trip to Paris, [Von Ebrennac] is disabused of his idealism. A furious and jolting flashback involving the gas chambers of Treblinka dispels his naïve self-delusion along with that of Melville's postwar French audience. In a masterstroke of cinematic bravado, the director seemingly breaks through the screen to address the audience with horror and outrage.

In his debut Melville is tender, as close to melodrama as he would ever be. Recounting the silent resistance waged by an unnamed Frenchman and his niece against the German lieutenant lodged for many garrulous months in their village home, the film transforms silence into an impossible, confessional realm: the lieutenant able to speak of peace and love (for the niece), the Frenchman able to respect him. But only in silence.

Le Silence de la Mer is a remarkable debut, stylistically assured and continuously involving... At once terse and lyrical, the film has the sheen of a prestigious literary adaptation but the ardor of underground cinema.

Melville lights and frames von Ebrennac's face as if he were the cyborg out of Metropolis. In his first appearance on screen, the man is hit full in the face by bright light as he stands on the doorstep of the house, the light sculpting and bouncing off the angles of his face to create a harsh, almost nonhuman physiognomy. While always suspicious of this man, Melville carefully, tentatively, proposes the possibility for the healing of German-Franco relations, at some point in future history.

With Le Silence de la Mer, Melville explores the modulations of speech and silence. For in the time of occupation and oppression that this film dramatises and that had only recently passed, speaking (or writing) up could be no less a form of resistance than keeping mum... The very existence of the book that Melville's film adapts and celebrates – a book that came to light under extraordinary circumstances and at great personal risk to its author – speaks volumes.

The black-and-white plot may be Melville's least complex and ambiguous, but it also reveals a different, idealistic side of a director better known for his melancholy murkiness. Meanwhile, a few quintessentially Melvillian themes—mutual respect between opponents, resolve as the highest moral calling—make their first appearances. This object lesson in expressive economy is rarely screened in Chicago; it'd be a shame to miss it.