Jean-Pierre Melville: The influential director who deeply inspired Quentin Tarantino
There are films, and then there are Quentin Tarantino films. Only someone with such an everlasting and encyclopedic knowledge of the history of cinema and its many forms could have established a style that is so unique but, paradoxically, steeped in the work of other auteurs and broader popular culture.
In many ways, Tarantino is the defining filmmaker of our times. While his movies might not be as sensorily arresting as Denis Villeneuve’s, as heart-stopping as the Safdie brothers, or as transcendental as Sofia Coppola’s, the deeply postmodern potpourri that Tarantino has made his own wholeheartedly reflects the nature of our times. This is an era where lines are blurred, and new realities are established by drawing upon existing ones extracted from the minds and experiences of others.
From paying homage to the blaxploitation flicks of the 1970s to the spaghetti westerns of the 1960s, the Californian auteur draws on a range of diverse areas to establish an aesthetic uniquely his. One environment he has made it clear he is particularly fond of is experimental cinema and those that do away with traditions to create a completely fresh approach, revitalising filmmaking.
Of course, this means that he is a lifelong fan of the French new wave of auteurs, which emerged in the 1950s off the back of the likes of François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais, Agnès Varda and more. Founded on a spirit of dissent fed up with the safe filmmaking of the status quo, the French New Wave galvanised cinema and pushed it down the more challenging, artful road it has since been heading further down.
For all proper movie lovers, the French New Wave provides the basis of their outlook and is the perfect place to start before exploring more recent but increasingly boundary-pushing releases. This means that while it is significant, just like musicians such as The Beatles or Jimi Hendrix, as people get older, they tend to move away from it but still hold its formative values dear. This is something that Tarantino once said when discussing the auteurs who made him.
He explained, “I’m not really a big fan of Jean-Luc Godard anymore”, before stating that in the beginning, when he was forging his aesthetic as an auteur, he was “so influential”. He wasn’t trying to be disrespectful either; he just outgrew Godard as his understanding of cinema matured. Furthermore, the lessons he taught him would be fundamental for all the success that came: “Godard is the one who taught me the fun, the freedom and the joy of breaking rules.”
However, there was one figure associated with the French new wave that Tarantino will never grow out of: Jean-Pierre Melville. Notably, Melville is considered the spiritual ancestor of the movement, as one of the first independent French filmmakers to strike out on his own stylistically and reject what was expected. In doing so, he found commercial and critical success with crime dramas such as 1956’s Bob le flambeur, 1962’s Le Doulos and 1967’s Le Samouraï.
In the same discussion, Tarantino said: “Melville is the Godard I haven’t grown out of.” Praising the Frenchman’s take on genre, he stated: “I think Melville, along with Sergio Leone, is probably the greatest reconstructionist of genre and really delivering, completely in his own way…”
Tarantino referenced Melville’s deep understanding of the rules of 1930s gangster films and 1940s noirs and how he re-wrote the blueprint by taking familiar plots and archetypes from American crime novels and rendering them in his image by having “real-life intrude upon them”. Although he maintained this was different from his and Elmore Leonard’s styles – the latter the celebrated crime writer behind Rum Punch, which Tarantino adapted into 1997’s Jackie Brown – the Pulp Fiction director was clearly impacted by this approach, as seen in his versions of many of cinema’s well-known archetypes and genres.
He concluded: “There’s an aesthetic working in Melville’s work that you get a sense that you don’t have to know how to make a movie; if you truly love cinema with all your heart and with enough passion, you can’t help but make a good movie, you don’t have to go to school… none of that shit’s important.”
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