Melville, Delon & Co

French photographer and visual artist Yannick Vallet takes on three Jean-Pierre Melville movies in a multi-pronged visual investigation. Over the course of 2017 (to coincide with the centenary of Melville’s birth) Vallet built a methodical inventory of places, objects, and trajectories that feature in Le Samouraï, Le Cercle rouge and Un flic, and has gathered all those visuals on a dedicated website.

 

Fascinated by the pervading sense of solitude in the trilogy of films, and by its characters, Vallet set out to document the universe of those three movies. His artistic exploration resembles the investigative work of a police detective: he made polaroids of objects, mapped the trajectories followed by characters, drew the guns used by the characters and reconstructed movie (crime) scenes… The result is a deconstruction of Melville’s filmic universe that is fetishistic and fanboyish, but also poetically inquisitive.