American Cinematographer - July 2007 - 69

of today’s TransLites. Onscreen, the scene has a credible though abstract quality. One of the best-known sequences in Army of Shadows takes place 30 minutes in, when Gerbier has to oversee the execution of a traitor, Dounat. The young traitor is picked up in a square by Felix, a Resistance member posing as a policeman, and taken by car to a seaside house. In the house, the shades are drawn, and Gerbier, Felix and another colleague, Claude, debate how to kill the whimpering boy. Clearly new at this, they end up strangling him with an improvised garrote, an ordeal that marks their rite of passage into the Resistance. The emotional impact of the execution sequence comes in great part from its rhythm and length. Melville takes the time to show each beat of hesitation, decision and fumbling as the Resistance members carry out their first execution. Throughout the picture, many scenes play out in lengthy wide shots with a minimum of dialogue, allowing the viewer to become immersed in the action. As Lhomme puts it on the DVD,“As an audience member, you always have time to think, even to ask yourself what you would do in that situation. What’s so strong about Melville’s mise en scène, about his way of storytelling, is that the audience is not violated. It’s not manipulative cinema.” The 11-minute execution sequence begins with a simple day exterior, as Felix meets with the traitor and takes him to the car. Lhomme remembers providing a little fill for the scene with a white sheet. To the cinematographer’s chagrin, the car ride was shot on a soundstage with classic rear-screen projection. Melville orchestrated a dolly move alongside the car. “It’s the opposite of what I would have done, and I was really unhappy,” says Lhomme. “Since the end of the Fifties, we had been shooting car scenes in real cars on location, just as we had stopped shooting cars without windshields. But Melville loved rear-screen.” Lhomme notes that the basic lighting unit for this scene was a quartz lamp with ordinary tracing paper diffusion, and often a 1⁄4 CTB gel to offset the warm tone of the paper. For closeups, he was forced to put Mitchell diffusion in front of the lens so “the close-ups wouldn’t look sharper than the wide shots.” When the car stops, the film shifts to a day exterior, which was shot on location in Marseille. Melville films the traitor being walked to the safe house in one economical shot that combines zoom, pan and crane moves to follow the trio down an alley. “You don’t really notice the moves because they’re well done,” says Lhomme. “The camera operator, Philippe Brun, was one of the best.” The action inside the house was shot on a soundstage, and the set was a modest, nondescript space. The scene begins with dark, moody day interiors, with light seeping in from shuttered windows. Then, in a wide-angle oneshot scene, the men close the curtains and turn on an overhead bulb, changing the setting to a night-like interior. With the slow film stocks of the time, says Lhomme,“I could not light whimsically. I had an overall indirect light and added punctual strokes to underline the light sources. In fact, I was trying to apply to the soundstage what I had learned on location. It must have been tough doing all those lighting changes in one shot.” All of the light sources had to come from walkways above the set, because Melville’s propensity for wide shots made it impossible to place lights on the floor. “When the lighting is above, it follows that THE 200UPR DUAL CHANNEL ON-CAMERA UHF RECEIVER! A dual 63-channel receiver, allowing you to record the voices of 2 subjects simultaneously! Available in the following complete system configurations: 200UPR receiver plus 2 10BT bodypacks with EX-503 lavalier mics. 200ULT 200UPR receiver plus 1 10BT and 1 10HT handheld mic. 200ULH 200UPR receiver plus 1 10BT and 1 51XT plug-in transmitter. 200ULX Or, you can order the individual components separately to make your own system. Other features of the 200UPR: • High gain antennas with BNC connectors • Separate on/off and freq. selectors for each channel • Compatible with all Azden 51, 41, and 10 series transmitters • Mini-to-mini and mini-to-dual-XLR cables included • Camera shoe-mount included • Uses "AA" batteries (not supplied) ® P.O. Box 10, Franklin Square, NY 11010 (516) 328-7500 • FAX: (516) 328-7506 For full specifications, visit our website: www.azdencorp.com 69

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American Cinematographer - July 2007

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - July 2007