Who does that for anyone? the films of Jean-Pierre Melville

He ‘made the war’ with his new name, and by the time it was over so many people knew him as Melville that there was no question of going back to Grumbach. ‘If I had been profoundly on the right, I couldn’t make the films I make,’ he told the Portuguese critic Rui Nogueira in Le Cinéma selon Melville, a book of interviews published two years before his death in 1973. Thanks to two recent books – Bertrand Teissier’s biography Jean-Pierre Melville: Le Solitaire and Jean-Pierre Melville, une vie, an unusually illuminating coffee-table book by the film critic Antoine de Baecque – we have a much fuller picture not only of Melville’s war, but of the ways it shaped his films.

Source: www.lrb.co.uk