If there is any specific sort of film that I can do without seeing for the rest of my life, it is any kind of Nazi and/or holocaust themed that was film directed by a 100% kosher Jew, as I cannot think of a single one that I do not find to be phony, pseudo-moralistic, grossly historically inaccurate, insipidly stupid and/or chronically clichéd, at least until relatively recently when I saw Le Silence De La Mer (1949) aka The Silence of the Sea directed by Jean-Pierre Melville […] I have never been that big of a Melville fan, at least until more recently when I realized that the auteur had contributed much more to cinema history than simply a masturbatory affection for old school American film noir. […] While I still consider the director’s classics like L’armée des ombres (1969) aka Army Of Shadows — a film that is, not without good reason, regarded by some critics as the auteur’s most personal film—to be overrated, I cannot praise enough Melville’s particularly preternatural and equally poetic debut Le Silence de la Mer.
In his entry on Melville in the invaluable two-volume tome Cinema: A Critical Dictionary (1980) edited by Richard Roud, Tom Milne stated in regard to the film that it was, “An entirely outlaw production, since Melville had no union, no authorization to buy film stock, and no rights to Vercors’ novel, Le Silence de la Mer, was an act of defiance in more ways than one, and not least because Vercors’ story was, as Melville remarked, essentially anti-cinematographic.” Based on the 1942 book of the same name by Jean Bruller (who published clandestinely under the pseudonymous “Vercors”) — a somewhat experimental piece of literary defiance famous for promoting a ‘mental resistance’ against the krauts during the Vichy era — the film was not only Melville’s debut feature, but also the first of a number of cinematic works that the auteur would direct about the French Resistance, which he only relatively recently had been demobbed from thus making it a rather personal work for the auteur. Indeed, unlike shoah showmen like Spielberg and Edward Zwick, Melville — an Alsatian Jew born Jean-Pierre Grumbach who adopted the nom de guerre Melville after the American author Herman Melville upon joining the French Resistance — actually fought the Nazis, lost a brother and various comrades in the war, and had very personal reasons to make a “anti-Nazi” oriented film. Of course, what makes Le Silence De La Mer especially intriguing is that the central figure is a rather sympathetic aristocratic Wehrmacht officer that defies stereotypes and is ultimately more internally destroyed by the Third Reich than the conquered French people that he tries in vain to establish a relationship with after being billeted in their home. Indeed, a rather romantic and absurdly idealistic artistic type, the German officer is a proud Francophile of the sorts that dreams of a long awaited marriage between Germany and France and thus is naturally completely internally obliterated when he realizes that his comrades plan to turn the country into a complete cultural wasteland. […]
[Read the rest of Ty’s review at Soiled Sinema]
Jack Abramoff 
