Jean-Pierre Melville in Breathless (Jean-Luc Godard, 1960).
The artist’s interview at its best—at its most entertaining and challenging—is a space for self-mythologization. Interviews can give the illusion of intimacy and deepen our understanding of the subject’s work and perspectives, but the exaggerations, contradictions, and omissions that a complex public image affords can frustrate that understanding, add mystique, and set in motion a perhaps knowingly futile pursuit of the artist's "real self." A good interview provides us with more questions than answers.
All interviews involve the subject’s negotiation between what to reveal and what to conceal; the result could be called their persona. And if they so desire, everything is costume: the way the artist moves, talks, dresses, holds a cigarette, reacts to the interviewer or audience. Consider Andy Warhol’s masterful inarticulacy from behind his matte, pale mask, dodging the press’s intrusive questions; the way Prince sets his stylized appearance against his soft but passionate tones, memorably describing the “negativity and entropy” of contemporary pop from behind his shades.
In the popular imagination, an essential item in the artist’s dress-up box is the pair of sunglasses, the ultimate signifier of celebrity and barrier to the private self. They are a particular favorite of filmmakers, mostly men—nowhere near as liable as women to be criticized for the supposed arrogance of self-performance—such as Fassbinder, Godard, Wong Kar-wai, and one of cinema’s greatest and trickiest interviewees, Jean-Pierre Melville. He often deployed his Ray-Bans indoors, on set, at night, during the many interviews he gave between the 1950s and early 1970s, before his death in 1973. Melville’s decisive cultivation of his public image is unsurprising, given his creation of stylized, hermetic films in which individuals conduct themselves according to the masks they wear and the codes, sometimes self-imposed, by which they must live and die—whether they are résistants, cops, gangsters, or assassins.
Those Ray-Bans feature in what remains his best-known interview: his cameo in Breathless (1960), in which he plays fictional celebrity author Parvulesco. He performs a version of his public persona, embracing and exaggerating his own sententiousness, his sunglasses helping him to remain aloof from a crowd of eager journalists and their cameras. However, when Jean Seberg’s Patricia asks him the final question, “What is your greatest ambition?”, he whips them off and gives the famous response: “To become immortal, and then die.” It is a moment that is both ridiculous and totally incontrovertible, a Melvillian combination of self-parody and earnestness that is present in so many of his own interviews.
Melville’s sunglasses were, as for so many cultural figures, a means of both attracting attention and disavowing it. They were a branding choice and telegraphed distance from the normal run of things, allowing him, a die-hard individualist, to stand out and stand apart. They were also a way of establishing a boundary between himself and the interviewer’s gaze. In the documentary Jean-Pierre Melville: A Portrait in Nine Poses, he describes sunglasses as “a mask, a kind of armor, a shield for the creator,” a means of maintaining an image of self-possession in the face of scrutiny. For Melville, being a subject did not mean being put in a passive, exposed position while the interviewer directed the conversation and had the final say. He preferred to be in control and on the offensive, once declaring (perhaps ironically, but, you sense, with feeling) that “no one ever asks me the questions that I would like to be asked. No one!”1
His need for control shows itself most in his monomania for work and the construction of his entire public image. His appearance was studiedly coherent, though it changed as he grew older, larger, and balder from one American-inspired look to another, homages to his cultural influences. He exchanged bow ties and preppy jumpers for elegant suits, his Ray-Bans, a fedora, or sometimes the more obvious eccentricity of the Stetson, as well as the (usually) unfaltering aesthete’s façade of courtesy and impassivity. And, like so many performers, he chose his own name, discarding Grumbach and becoming Melville, for the American author, one of his self-proclaimed gods. Belonging firmly to the tradition of male egotism, he was a monologist of his own convictions, a mythmaker of his own life—or silent. At the same time, remarking that “it’s tragic to take yourself seriously,” he took pleasure in putting on a show, had a gift for storytelling, and was something of a wind-up merchant; he was considered, according to writer Philippe Labro, “good value on television,”2 appearing often as a guest on French talk shows.
Melville’s career coincided with a ripening of the interview form in both niche and mass culture. Agnès Varda appeared on US television alongside Susan Sontag; Orson Welles was interviewed by Kenneth Tynan for Playboy. Interviews were also a staple of cinephile publications such as Cahiers du cinéma and Sight and Sound. Longer exchanges were published as books, including the highly detailed and exploratory Le Cinéma selon Jean-Pierre Melville (Cinema according to Melville, 1973) conducted by the critic Rui Nogueira, who was also a good friend. True to his status as both a mainstream and filmmaker’s filmmaker, Melville could often be found in both arenas. He occupied a culture not as commercially pressurized as our own, so he wasn’t always interviewed simply to plug his latest release. Without the burden of constant self-promotion, there was space for both wide-ranging conversations and performance. Melville often discussed his time during the war, perspectives on his milieu, and contemporary cinema, as well as his own films and influences; and the style in which they were expressed was just as important, sometimes more so, than the topics themselves.
Jean-Pierre Melville in Breathless (1960).
Perhaps having kept his Breathless cameo in mind for future reference, Melville also used his Ray-Bans to great effect during a televised interview in 1971 for the release of his penultimate film, Le cercle rouge (1970). Sunglasses on inside the studio, deadpan expression in place, Melville’s argument is passionate, but is expressed in his usual mannered, measured way. He airs a well-matured grievance: that French cinema is “worse than ever,” hampered by oppressive state regulation. At the end of the segment, he pauses and asks to address André Astoux directly, then president of the Centre National du Cinéma, which controlled the distribution of funding to filmmakers—chronically misplaced, according to Melville. He turns to face the camera and once again removes his sunglasses, revealing a weary but intent gaze: “I will address myself, if you will let me, through your microphone, through your camera, to M. Astoux, our great master, on the problem of cinema…Let it be what it must be, that is to say, an art absolutely free of everything.”
Melville enjoyed drawing a very thin line between parody and sincerity that ultimately drove his convictions home, to make you take notice, and to compound candor rather than undercut it. While the sunglasses court absurdity and cliché, their removal arrives as a flourish. It’s a finishing touch of drama as well as a performance of honesty, even vulnerability—the sudden revelation of the filmy paleness of his eyes, the frankness of his wrinkles and dark circles—but one that is no doubt harnessed for sincerity, even urgency.
His uncompromising views on cinema and their hyperbolic tone weren’t solely his own, but were part of the general tenor of mid-century French cinéaste culture. The pages of Cahiers du cinéma were its bible and battleground, in which watching, making, and writing about films were all treated as if they were a matter of life and death. This was a mostly masculine arena of Sturm und Drang: Emilie Bickerton, in her Short History of the journal, quotes the inaugural issue’s manifesto, which condemned in 1951 “the malevolent neutralism that would tolerate a mediocre cinema, a prudential criticism and a stupefied public,”3 certainly cherished targets of Melville all through his career. However, unlike the increasingly anti-capitalist discourse and filmmaking by Cahiers auteurs such as Godard and Jacques Rivette, Melville, ever committed to l’art pour l’art, mostly kept his cinematic opinions personal and aesthetic, but no less vociferous.
Of course, he never had to be wary of the depredations of social media pile-ons. Compared to the cultural figures of our time, Melville’s reputation was on less precarious ground; he did not have to pretend to be agreeable or relatable, the latter a concept far from his purview. As a result, he is perversely likable, sharp tongued as well as interesting. He indulged for years in public feuding with his New Wave peers: as the 1960s went on, he distanced himself from the movement’s overtly political work, becoming invested in making films that would be more widely seen and lucrative while retaining an auteur’s artistic freedom. However, his work was unfairly criticized in Cahiers as part of a group of films “imbued through and through with the dominant ideology in pure and unadulterated form,”4 while Melville remarked that “what they called the New Wave contributed enormously to the deterioration of French cinema,”5 despite his enduring status as the movement’s pioneering “godfather.” He ultimately rejected this label, describing himself as “head of a huge family of totally illegitimate children whom I had no desire to recognize.”6
And yet he often held back: he does not give too much of himself, is not frankly emotional. While he sometimes spoke about aspects of his personal life such as his experiences during the war—although almost never in straightforwardly transparent terms—he omits others, say his relationship with his wife Florence, past romances, or his attitude to faith and his Jewish heritage. He leaves room for mystery and for his films to breathe, which is perhaps why they have not become overshadowed by his persona. In fact, Melville is often eclipsed by the image of Alain Delon clad in fedora and trench coat, cigarette in hand, and whose enigmatic roles in Le cercle rouge and Le samouraï (1967) in particular, are often used as shorthand for Melville and his work as a whole.
He exactingly controlled how much was known about his life, particularly his time spent fighting in the French Resistance during the Second World War. Very little is known about this period of his life, and Melville seems content to leave these gaps in his biography unfilled. He frequently discussed his wartime experiences in interviews, but often in ways that allowed him, as Ginette Vincendeau writes, to “deliberately cultivate mystery.”7 In his essay “My Father in the Art,” Bertrand Tavernier writes that when Melville was asked about his time in England, he liked to say that he had gone to London simply to see Powell & Pressburger’s The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), rather than to sign up for the Free French Forces.
Whenever and wherever he actually saw the film, it is not surprising that Melville loved such a supremely ambivalent excavation of twentieth-century war. He was drawn to taking sides, but at the same time welcomed ambiguity and took pleasure in unsettling his interlocutors, once telling a reporter about his “excellent, warm and cordial” friendship with former members of the SS, as quoted by Adrien Bosc in his essay “Double Exposure.” Bosc notes that Melville went on to clarify (or not): “I don’t try to explain it at all. And yet I think I can explain it. I like people who take part in things, who—and I apologize for the common expression—wet their oar, who do things. And I believe that people who have risked their lives for a bad cause or a good cause are interesting people. I don’t much like people who stay neutral.” Melville worked with collaborationists numerous times, including actor Roger Duchesne, the eponymous Bob le flambeur (1956), and José Giovanni, with whom Melville wrote the screenplay for Le deuxième souffle (1966), based on Giovanni’s novel. He was never more certain of anything than the importance of ambivalence itself—even if this conviction was sometimes expressed in bloody-minded or exaggerated terms.
He could also be more reflective, particularly during his exchange with Nogueira, relaxing into the relative intimacy provided by speaking to a friend, and lacking a live audience, TV host, or reporter to shock. While discussing his third film about the Resistance, Army of Shadows (1969), he returns to his own experiences, remembering a young man from his division laid out under an apple blossom, and frames the moment in explicitly cinematic terms:
It was spring. When I saw that he was going to die, I made a gesture that I must have seen in a film one day—see how cinema will pursue you for a long time—I lit a cigarette and placed it between his lips. He looked at me for a second. He took two puffs and then he died. Imagine spring in the Italian countryside, we weren’t so far from Florence, the weather was fine, and then there was this kid who died at twenty. When it comes to war films, reality has always outpaced cinema.8
Melville’s anecdotes are fully formed set pieces recounted with eloquence. There is less of that époque’s rawness, and more a time-hardened, perhaps protective layer of artifice. It is like a scene from a film only he could make inside his head, rigorously directed and edited, constructed around the unsaid. And yet life “outpaces” art, surpassing in beauty and pain what any war film could have portrayed, even in the moment’s, you want to say scene’s, cinematic qualities: the pathos and sentimentality of the cigarette, the spring blossom, the beautiful weather, the almost gentle pastoral death. The interview for Melville is less about dialogue, and more a monologic repository of memory and perspective.
Despite his refusal to allow transparent insight into his interiority or private life, you do get a sense of Melville as a person through his interviews. While the mask never slips, exactly, what constitutes the mask expands, complicates, deepens as we attempt to get to know him. It does not create an image of artifice which stands in opposition to sincerity: in fact, he comes across as highly authentic, because this mask is a chosen, considered version of himself and his opinions. He had a recognizable brand to which he was totally faithful in a surprisingly modern way—he would have been entertaining, and potentially troublesome, on Twitter (or, in Paul Schrader’s example, Facebook). At the same time this brand is, from our contemporary perspective, an unusual one, built as it is on irony, contradiction, deflection, as well as wild opinions, ironclad beliefs, and a devil-may-care attitude to provocation.
Cultural figures who, like Melville, acknowledge the artifice of the public self achieve a paradoxical kind of authenticity in staying true to their chosen self-image. What’s more common today is the appearance of being “down to earth,” a straightforward attempt at authenticity and connection to the public. Given the contemporary association of concealment with sin rather than mystique, the safest mask is acting as if you have nothing to hide. The understandable fear of talking or acting out of turn—and failing to sell the product, which of course includes the artist themselves—also spells an inevitable resistance to style, to artifice; leaving us with, if anything at all, personality rather than persona.
Jean-Pierre Melville in Breathless (1960).
1. Nogueira, Rui. Le Cinéma selon Jean-Pierre Melville. Translation my own. 3rd ed. Capricci, 2021, p. 101
2. Vincendeau, Ginette. Jean-Pierre Melville: An American in Paris. BFI, 2003, p. 13.
3. Bickerton, Emilie. A Short History of Cahiers du Cinéma. Verso, 2011, p. 1.
4. Vincendeau, p. 16.
5. Vincendeau, p. 134.
6. Shatz, Adam. "Who does that for anyone?" LRB 20 June 2019. London Review of Books. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41/n12/adam-shatz/who-does-that-for-anyone
7. Vincendeau, p. 6.
8. Nogueira, p. 170.