Hacker Cinema
Army of Shadows
L'Armée des ombres
1969 · Film · 145 min
Directed by Jean-Pierre Melville
Betrayed by an informant, Philippe Gerbier finds himself trapped in a torturous Nazi prison camp. Though Gerbier escapes to rejoin the Resistance in occupied Marseilles, France, and exacts his revenge on the informant, he must continue a quiet, seemingly endless battle against the Nazis in an atmosphere of tension, paranoia and distrust.
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5 comments on Hacker News
Andre Rublev's ending is immaculate.
Miller's Army of Shadows (1969) was the the first time I saw on film how it might be to know you are about to die. I can only find an unsubtitled version: the German officer tells the French resistance protagonist that he has a chance if he runs and gets to the back wall before being shot by the machine guns- he'll live to be executed another day. At first he refuses but survival kicks in and he runs believing he will be shot in the back at any moment. I urge you to watch the film in entirety to experience the intensity of the scene, alone doesn't do it justice. The first time I saw this it was like it was in slow motion, after so much had already happened in the film.
https://youtu.be/LJtTPzrDtkM
> I had never seen a war movie produced outside of Hollywood. Or a director with primarily french influences producing a war movie.
Not sure if the stipulation is a war movie about Vietnam, or just plain a war movie. But certainly here's a list of some non-U.S. 20th century war movies, very vivid, biased towards France:
The Battle of Algiers (French, Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966)
Come and See (Russian, Elem Klimov, 1985)
Ivan's Childhood (Russian, Andrei Tarkovsky, 1962)
Beau Travail (French, Claire Denis, 1999) -- OK, soldiers but not war
Army of Shadows (French, Jean-Pierre Melville, 1969)
A Man Escaped (French, Robert Bresson, 1956) -- POW, not front lines
Little Dieter Needs To Fly (British/French/German?, Werner Herzog, 1997) -- actually relates to the war in Vietnam
His Army of Shadows is one of the most harrowing films I've ever seen, particularly a riveting, nail biting scene about prisoners waiting to get shot. Now I understand why he knew how to impart such tension about being in the resistance. This director is a true treasure of his time.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Army_of_Shadows
This kind of emotional experience is beyond understanding for most of us (and hopefully remains so). The masterpiece of a film Army of Shadows by Jean-Pierre Melville has a scene in it, of an execution that .. (I won't continue with spoilers). It was one of the most powerful things I've ever watched that made me feel maybe just a tiny bit, what that might be like.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Army_of_Shadows
One thing I was hoping this series would shed light on was an oddity in demographic voting patterns with the ratings system.
From my own (anecdotal) observation, there's a class of films where the 'Females 45+' rating is a big outlier in the voting, with a large proportion of '1' votes. it's as if there's a gang of a few hundred users consistently downvoting films who are classed by IMDB as being part of that demographic - I don't know if it's a default setting that some bots or trolls have used or if there really are a bunch of cinephobic old women out there just watching and hating on films, but it did spark my curiosity as to what the pattern was. It doesn't happen in every film, and it's rare that you see any other demographic sticking out like this.
The best examples are critically acclaimed films with low voter counts. More popular, or less well-received films tend to have a lot of negative noise to begin with, so the effect is less noticeable, if it's there at all.
Here's some examples:
Army of Shadows : http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064040/ratings?ref_=tt_ov_rt
Spartacus : http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0054331/ratings?ref_=tt_ov_rt
Ikiru : http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0044741/ratings?ref_=tt_ov_rt
Passion of Joan of Arc : http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0019254/ratings?ref_=tt_ov_rt
Breathless : http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053472/ratings?ref_=tt_ov_rt
Z : http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0065234/?ref_=fn_al_tt_2
Barry Lyndon : http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0072684/ratings?ref_=tt_ov_rt