Rififi and the Politics of Silence

One of the most famous sequences in postwar European film is a twenty-five-minute stretch near the middle of Jules Dassin's Rififi (1955) in which a gang of jewelry thieves drills through an apartment floor to get into a diamond store whose safe they are determined to crack. The sequence is shot entirely without dialogue and without a musical score, and the only sounds we hear come from the tools of the burglars and the chords of a piano when one of the gang members inadvertently hits a key. This is a moment of virtuoso filmmaking, widely imitated and parodied throughout world cinema and repeatedly commented upon by film critics who have identified this sequence as emblematic of the tension between plot and sensation in postwar narrative cinema. What commentators have observed less frequently, however, is the extent to which this sequence is bound up with the politics of the postwar world. Rififi is not the only film made in Europe around 1955 to highlight sound technology. Robert Bresson's Un Condamné à mort s'est échappé (1956), Max Ophuls' Lola Montès (1955), and Jean-Pierre Melville's Bob le flambeur (1955) all inscribe reflections on hearing and sound technologies into their narratives. What is particular to Rififi is that these long stretches of silence act as a kind of evidentiary residue of a politics that could not, for various reasons, be expressed directly on screen. We have only limited information about why Dassin refused the entreaties of his producers and decided not to add music to the burglary scene. But whatever the director's intentions, the sequence without dialogue and without a musical score opens Rififi to the sounds and especially to the silences produced when governments become intent upon compelling citizens and subjects to speak, to reveal their secrets, and to betray their political desires. What follows is an attempt to disclose the historical and political character of Rififi's aesthetic innovation.

The story of how Jules Dassin made Rififi is well known. Dassin had been one of the leading directors of postwar Hollywood, having made several successful thrillers, including the prison drama Brute Force (1947) and the thriller Night and the City (1950). While working on the latter in London, Dassin was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee, which had accused him of being a former member of the American Communist party. Because he chose not to return to Hollywood to work or to Washington to testify, Dassin found himself in Europe and unemployed. In 1954 he was contacted, almost in extremis, to film Rififi in France, which he did, on a relatively modest budget. Rififi came out at a moment of great interest in the film noir in France: Jacques Becker's Touchez pas au grisbi, Jean-Pierre Melville's Bob le flambeur, Henri-George Clouzot's Les Diaboliques, Je suis un sentimental directed by another American refugee from the McCarthy hearings, John Berry, and Raymond Borde and Étienne Chaumeton's classic study, A Panorama of American Film Noir (the book that put the term into wide circulation)—all appeared in 1954 or 1955. Rififi won the prize for best direction at the 1955 Cannes film festival, and François Truffaut called it "the best crime film I have ever seen" made from one of "the worst crime novels I have ever read." ¹

Rififi is the story of a French gangster, Tony le Stéphanois—the compound name ties him to a long list of fictional gangsters, Pépé le Moko, Bob le flambeur, Pierrot le fou, Querelle de Brest—who, after five years in jail, comes back to Paris, meets his old gang, and pulls off a major diamond robbery on the rue de la Paix. A rival gang hears about the heist, and they set out to get their hands on either the diamonds or the money that Tony makes fencing the loot. The rivals capture one of Tony's colleagues, an Italian safecracker named César le Milanais (played by Dassin himself), interrogate him to find out where the money is, kill Tony's best friends, and...