“A movie maker must be a witness of his time. In fifty years, when my films are watched over a three-day period, the viewers ought to say that the first of these films and the last one unquestionably have something in common, either when it comes to language or in respect to what they aim to say; that through made-up stories, one always finds the same author, the same guy, with always the same colors on his palette. It is absolutely essential that the last film resemble the very first one.
The ideal creator is the one who forged an exemplary work.
Not exemplary in the sense of virtue or quality only, and not in the sense that someone is exceptional because everything he does is admirable, but exemplary in the sense that whatever he has designed can be condensed in ten lines of twenty-five words each, twenty-five words sufficient to explain what he did and who he was”.
Jean-Pierre Melville
“A movie maker must be a witness of his time. In fifty years, when my films are watched over a three-day period, the viewers ought to say that the first of these films and the last one unquestionably have something in common, either when it comes to language or in respect to what they aim to say; that through made-up stories, one always finds the same author, the same guy, with always the same colors on his palette. It is absolutely essential that the last film resemble the very first one.
The ideal creator is the one who forged an exemplary work.
Not exemplary in the sense of virtue or quality only, and not in the sense that someone is exceptional because everything he does is admirable, but exemplary in the sense that whatever he has designed can be condensed in ten lines of twenty-five words each, twenty-five words sufficient to explain what he did and who he was”.
Jean-Pierre Melville
Vingt-quatre heures de la vie d’un clown 1946
Bob, le flambeur
1955
L’aîné des Ferchaux
1963
Le silence de la mer
1949
Deux hommes dans Manhattan
1959
Le deuxième souffle
1966
Le cercle rouge
1970
Les enfants terribles
1950
Léon Morin, prêtre
1961
Le samouraï
1967
Un flic
1972
Quand tu liras cette lettre
1953
Le doulos
1962
L’armée des ombres
1969
Jean-Pierre Melville strongly influenced entire generations of internationally renown filmmakers such as Michael Mann, Martin Scorcese, Quentin Tarantino, Kelly Reichardt, or SpikeLee in the USA; Bertrand Tavernier, Olivier Marchal, and Olivier Assayas in France; Takeshi Kitano and Masahiro Kobayashi in Japan; John Woo and Johnny To in China; Kim Jee-Wun and Na Hong-Jin in South Korea; Nicolas Winding-Refn in Denmark; Christian Petzold in Germany; Hani-Abu Assad in Palestine; and Pen-Ek Ratanaruang in Thailand, to name a few.
This is what they have to say about him: