FS Dans Le Cinéma: Éric Demarsan

L’armée des ombres, filmed in 1969, was Jean-Pierre Melville’s gloomy and highly gripping account of the Résistance featuring Lino Ventura (see right) in one of his finest roles – a sombre, sober movie with one of the most hopeless endings in French cinema history. The film was scored by the relatively unknown Éric Demarsan who also wrote the music for the TV series Belle et Sébastien (which obviously quite impressed some British folk popsters), and Melville’s bleak caper movie Le cercle rouge. Demarsan’s intricately crafted, highly accomplished bande originale for L’armée des ombres culminates in his Thème de Gerbier, evolving from a painfully melancholic piano melody into a heartbreakingly beautiful landscape of the French soul.

Éric Demarsan – Thème de Gerbier