Jean-Pierre Melville's film about the French Resistance made in 1969 was finally released in the United States in 2006. The film is adapted from Joseph Kessel's book of the same name and is an account of the author's experience in the French resistance; it was published in London in 1943 as a fictionalized work of reportage. Melville himself was supposedly connected with the French resistance but there is no doubt he fought with the Free French in North Africa. When the film initialy came out it was ignored during the heyday of the French New Wave. Characters and storys in the film were based on real people and incidents that actually took place in the French resistance.
What was Gurdjieff doing during the German occupation of Paris? For a detailed description see William Patrick Patterson's book Voices in the Dark. It includes transcripts of meetings between Gurdjieff and his students, the influence of the pseudo-occult on the German order and the voices speaking of citizens, soldiers, political figures and intellectuals. Gurdjieff had stayed with his pupils in France instead of going to America during the occupation. What would it be like to live in the uncertainty of not knowing if your friends were informers, of not knowing if you would have food to eat and realizing that France, the country with the largest standing army at the time, had been easily overun by the Germans?
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