ABSTRACT
Melville’s writings evoke meanings for a worldwide audience of filmgoers, especially the fans of the twentieth-century cinematic aesthetic of film noir. In fact, the postwar French film director Jean-Pierre Melville thought well enough of the American author to adopt “Melville” as his nom de caméra before going on to create a string of successful features during a ten-year period that began in the mid-1950s. Each of these was urban in its orientation, Jean-Pierre Melville having drawn special inspiration (as well as a self-endowed forename) from the highly stylized city-mysteries themes, images, and character types that appear in the latter half of Herman Melville’s novel Pierre; or, the Ambiguities (1852). The connection between the two Melvilles was more than nominal. Both artists regarded the city with a mixture of fascination and repulsion. In Jean-Pierre Melville, this ambivalence reappeared on screen with added emphasis in the director’s 1967 classic, Le Samouraï. The film watches as the novel Pierre reads. Each is a representational paradox of moving images that hardly manage to move—whether as a forward-tending storyline or as an impactful emotional experience for readers and viewers.
