For a director who changed his name because of his admiration for Herman Melville, Jean-Pierre Melville's work also pursues the theme of Captain Ahab's "obsession" in Moby Dick, 1967's "Lone Killer" is not necessarily a typical tragedy caused by "obsession", but the killer "Jeff" eventually went to self-destruction because of unusual principles, but if we turn over the gauze on the surface of "Lone Killer" , but found it to be a modern allegory of the soul's predicament.
Create loneliness with images
Although Melville is known as the "Godfather" of the French New Wave, the American gangster films in his films are full of flavor. Even the dramatic development of the overall story of the film is in the style of Hollywood noir films, but as long as you have seen his films people, but can clearly feel the difference between the two. As one of the image symbols of Melville killer films, visual delay seems to be an inescapable topic. The beginning of "Lone Killer" is nearly two minutes. In the final frame, Jeff, the killer smoking in bed, is like the tiger in the forest as the subtitles say, and he can endure extreme loneliness.
In addition to the visual delay in the long shots, there are also a lot of shots of Jeff walking in a trench coat. The back or side pictures of Alain Delon are often accompanied by free saxophone music or live sound. In this film, "Walking" has become the externalization of "escape". Jeff often walks at a brisk pace, alert to everything that happens around him. Although he is a thoughtful and quick-moving killer, the director makes him "hard" through the creation of the camera. The outer shell of the film is cut open, allowing careful viewers to gain insight into the meaning behind "walking".
Another antagonistic behavior that recurs in the film is the trick from the police station and Jeff. The scenes of "surveillance" and "anti-surveillance" appearing in the film are not only the large-scale raids in the subway station later, but also in the first half. Police Duan infiltrated Jeff's residence and eavesdropped on his every move. And Melville also played a little trick in this paragraph, that is, he did not inform in advance who infiltrated Jeff's room to install the bug, was it the police, or was it the big guy who hired the killer? We didn't know this until later. Like Melville's 1962 "Eyeline", in the latter, the plot deliberately omitted key scenes, causing the viewers, like the gang members, to misunderstand the motives of the male protagonist. Thought he betrayed his accomplice. And "Lone Killer" did this to create an effect of "ambush from all sides without knowing who it is", whether Jeff knows it, we can't speculate, but at least the viewers do.
And this kind of image design is precisely to create Jeff's "loneliness" and "uneasiness". His uneasy first comes from his identity - the killer, and secondly is the police's unscrupulous investigation. This "unscrupulous" in the film One of the scenes is exposed without any cover, that is, the police went to Jeff's girlfriend's house and threatened her with jail in order to get his girlfriend to provide "perjury". Jeff's final "suicide" was largely for his girlfriend. No more harassment by the police. The root cause of the killer's "insecurity" is still "distrust", which is a kind of self-distrust and distrust of the whole society. If we notice that Jeff and a girl occasionally look at each other after stealing a car at the beginning After "disdainful" dodging, you can feel the feeling of his desire for interpersonal communication and fear of communication.
Distant viewing, or the hypnosis of bird cages?
The German dramatist Brecht once proposed the "distancing experience" to guide the actors to shape their characters. The "experience school" acting style is just the opposite. For "Lone Killer", it may be that Melville did not let Alain Delon see Brecht's theatrical theory during the filming, but one thing is certain, that is the effect of the film after the film is finished. , so that viewers have to adopt a detached thinking mode to analyze the images in the film.
In fact, the presentation of this detachment method has a considerable connection with the sound and picture strategy in the film. As mentioned above, the minimalist dialogue makes the film present a kind of static gloom. The whole film uses gray and black as the The main colors, as well as the low-contrast and low-key lighting, make the film not only cover the coat of Hollywood black crime films in the 1940s, but also create a style of alienation of formalism, and an important method of formalism is It is the repetition of forms, and the unspoken theme is embodied by repeated actions or scenes.
In the film, Alain Delon's decent and delicate shape and the meticulous finishing before wearing a rolled-brimmed hat constitute the killer's meticulous image and style, while the caged bird that accompanies him is a kind of alarm. As his partner, Jeff was the first to be alerted of danger, whether it was the bird's restlessness after the police installed the monitor, or the bird's feathers falling after the killer sneaked into the house, but the bird with this symbol is actually It's not just an alarm, it's Jeff's inner avatar.
As a lonely and uneasy member, Jeff is like a bird in a cage, unable to control his actions, and can only complete the killing task "step by step" in his "cage". The pervasiveness and presence of bird calls in the film is not so much a decorative discourse strategy, but rather a subconscious hypnotic effect that makes the viewers hear the bird calls every time. It's like walking into Jeff's inner world, but in the low-key lighting and the formalist sound and picture effect without dialogue, we are clearly pulling away from ourselves and standing outside to think about everything that happens in front of us, just like Jeff's At the beginning and end of the film, the stolen car is sent into the garage to change the license plate every time, and the barking of the dog when entering and leaving is also a kind of hypnosis. In the boring "As usual", it tells the helplessness of an urban killer.
Just like Melville's debut "The Silence of the Sea", he always uses scenes and actions to narrate, and sometimes even omits the actions, leaving only the artistic conception, just like the old man in "The Silence of the Sea" My niece's last sentence "Goodbye", "Lone Killer" is also using the close-up of the revolver without bullets, which has put a heavy stamp on this classic killer-themed film.
This article first appeared on "Barcelona Cinema"
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