"The poetry, if there is any, comes from the tautness. It arises out of simplification"

December 13, 2004 10:30 AM

"When one is in prison, the most important thing is the door". The precise coordination of every element of filmmaking -- camera distance, sound, theme, narrative, motion, color, human action -- so that it functions with rhythmic clarity: that is the cinema of Robert Bresson, who died five years ago aged 98. A "Christian atheist" by his own description, he made only 13 films (and a short) and created a cinema of paradox, in which "the denial of emotion creates emotionally overwhelming works, the withholding of information makes for narrative density, and attention to 'the surface of the work' produces inexhaustible depth". Paul Schrader, the most famous among Bresson scholars, wrote that "Bresson has seemed like God himself; distant, beyond communication. Now, like God, Bresson is dead". More inside.
posted by matteo (12 comments total)

While Bresson recognized the legitimacy of acting in the theater, he did not approve of it in films, where he regarded it as "inventing" or "deforming" persons. According to him, it violates the particularity and purpose of cinema -- the most realistic of the arts. Turning to his "Notes" once again, we read: "What our eyes and ears require is not the realistic personal but the real person." And again, concerning models: "Movement from the exterior to the interior. (Actors: movement from the interior to the exterior.)"

__________

Schrader says that " "Pickpocket gave me the courage to write Taxi Driver".

__________

The (already mentioned on MeFi) Masters of Cinema has great resources on Bresson
posted by matteo at 10:56 AM on December 13, 2004

"What our eyes and ears require is not the realistic personal but the real person."

Curiously large mass of descriptive words here in lieu of the real person, or even the real image.
posted by semmi at 11:10 AM on December 13, 2004

Thanks, matteo. "Au hasard Balthazar," which showed at Film Forum in a new print about a year ago, was one of the best movies I saw in 2003. I'm looking forward to digging through the links.
posted by muckster at 11:22 AM on December 13, 2004

"Pickpocket" is one of my favorites. Lots to go through here, thanks!
posted by Songdog at 11:42 AM on December 13, 2004

Good 35mm prints of Bresson's stuff are hard to come by. I suspect that this dogged the release and eventual quality of the Criterion Diary of a Country Priest, which is a very good transfer, but not great.

That being said, I am always fascinated when I come across a contemporary film that has clearly been influenced by Bresson (or, for that matter, Ozu, Carl Dreyer, or Jean Vigo). I start wondering which films among those made by modern, relatively uncelebrated or misunderstood filmmakers (or just uncelebrated or misunderstood individual films) will provide consistent, lasting inspiration for future directors. Will Breaking the Waves be a fount of influence fifty years from now? What about Raise the Red Lantern? Eyes Wide Shut? Magnolia {shudder}? Rushmore? The Three Colors trilogy? Kill Bill? Desperate Living?

Trivial academia is fun!
posted by gramschmidt at 11:43 AM on December 13, 2004

If only he'd made more movies. I love his aphoristic Notes on Cinematography (which should really be translated "Notes on Making Movies" or the like). Thanks for the post, which will take a while to work through!
posted by languagehat at 2:21 PM on December 13, 2004

Bresson's Movies (Robert Creeley)
A movie of Robert
Bresson's showed a yacht,
at evening on the Seine,
all its lights on, watched

by two young, seemingly
poor people, on a bridge adjacent,
the classic boy and girl
of the story, any one

one cares to tell. So
years pass, of course, but
I identified with the young,
embittered Frenchman,

knew his almost complacent
anguish and the distance
he felt from his girl.
Yet another film

of Bresson's has the
aging Lancelot with his
awkward armor standing
in a woods, of small trees,

dazed, bleeding, both he
and his horse are,
trying to get back to
the castle, itself of

no great size. It
moved me, that
life was after all
like that. You are

in love. You stand
in the woods, with
a horse, bleeding.
The story is true.
posted by rafter at 2:29 PM on December 13, 2004 [1 favorite]

Thanks for all these great links. Bresson is one of my favorites. Au Hasard Balthazar was recently screened in Chicago; it was great to see it on the big screen. Michael Wilmington's review is right on about the final scene:

"One of the most moving and exalting images in all of the cinema comes at the end of Robert Bresson's "Au Hasard Balthazar": the shot of the little donkey Balthazar dying on a hillside, while a flock of sheep streams past him, their white wool almost glowing in the crystalline sunlight. It is a sequence whose mysterious beauty and tranquility affect you powerfully every time you see the film."

Indeed.
posted by footballrabi at 3:13 PM on December 13, 2004

Bresson was one of the best.
I recommend two books. One is by Bresson titled Notes on the Cinematographer. It is 140 pages long and is mainly comprised of aphorisms and thoughts by Bresson. Some of it is so stripped down and arcane that it almost sounds like Zen. For instance, "Respect man's nature without wishing it more palpable than it is." And "What is for the eye must not duplicate what is for the ear."

The other is a 500 page book of essays by James Quandt. It may be hard to find but it's pretty definitive.
posted by Rashomon at 11:37 PM on December 13, 2004

Right, Notes on the Cinematographer is the title! No wonder I couldn't find a good link for it.
posted by languagehat at 6:56 AM on December 14, 2004

Notes sur le cinématographe. you can't go wrong with Gallimard
posted by matteo at 7:32 AM on December 14, 2004

only tangentially related, cool retrospective at the Cinémathèque:
Carax, le dernier romantique
posted by matteo at 7:34 AM on December 14, 2004