Melville: Surrealism/Existentialism/Americanophilia

Attempting to define the particular kind of noir sensibility which emerged in post-WWII Paris, James Naremore lights on the figure of Boris Vian (AKA ‘Vernon Sullivan’) (1920–59). Several facets of Vian connect with filmmaker Jean-Pierre Melville (1917–73): the adoption of an American pseudonym (Melville was born Jean-Pierre Grumbach); a deep involvement with American culture (in Vian's case, jazz; in Melville’s, primarily cinema); the capacity to oscillate between, and perhaps to meld, high culture and mass culture; and a personal association with both the contemporary movements of Surrealism and Existentialism.

Indeed, this last point illustrates the extent to which the interpellative discourses open to the post-WWII Parisian intelligentsia were dominated by Surrealism and Existentialism. Both movements partook of American culture, it being probable that the Surrealists were particularly taken with American cinema and the Existentialists with American literature. André Breton (1896–1966)'s favourite film was Peter Ibbetson (Henry Hathaway, 1935) and James Naremore has demonstrated that, although the term ‘noir’ had to some extent been applied by the French to their own pre-WWII cinema, the application of the term ‘film noir’ to certain American films in post-WWII Paris by critics such as Raymond Borde (1920–2004) and Etienne Chaumeton came from within Surrealist circles. If Surrealistinspired Borde and Chaumeton saw in the American film noir all that was ‘oneiric, bizarre, erotic, ambivalent, and cruel’, the Existentialists drew other lessons from the novels of Dashiell Hammett (1894–1961), Raymond Chandler (1888–1959) and James M. Cain (1892–1977), ‘pulp’ writers whom they bracketed with ‘serious’ novelists like Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961), William Faulkner (1897–1962) and John Dos Passos (1896–1970). The Existentialists were entranced by a particular kind of American hero driven to action in a meaningless universe.

Jean-Pierre Melville was very close to being of the generation of Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80) and, apart from a brief brush with Surrealism through his association with Jean Cocteau (1889–1963) in the making of Les Enfants terribles (Melville, 1950), the philosophical basis of Melville's work was to remain throughout his life Americanophile Existentialism or, perhaps more accurately, Americanophilia later bolstered by Existentialism before it became fully politically committed. This is particularly true of his great gangster trilogy: Le Doulos (1962), Le deuxième souffle (1966) and Le Samouraï (1967).