Encyclopedia, Difference between revisions of "Robert Bresson" - New World

From New World Encyclopedia
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'''Robert Bresson''' (French IPA: {{IPA|[ʀɔ'bɛʀ bʀɛ'sɔ̃]}}) (September 25, 1901–December 18, 1999) was a French film director. Working within the medium of narrative cinema, he created a film grammar and syntax that was uniquely his own, although he had a significant influence on many others. Bresson dispensed with spectacle and drama in favor of a lean and minimalist cinematic style that points to spirituality and transcendence.
 
'''Robert Bresson''' (French IPA: {{IPA|[ʀɔ'bɛʀ bʀɛ'sɔ̃]}}) (September 25, 1901–December 18, 1999) was a French film director. Working within the medium of narrative cinema, he created a film grammar and syntax that was uniquely his own, although he had a significant influence on many others. Bresson dispensed with spectacle and drama in favor of a lean and minimalist cinematic style that points to spirituality and transcendence.
 +
 +
Bresson is often referred to as a "patron saint" of cinema, not only for the strong Catholic themes found throughout his oeuvre, but also for his notable contributions to the art of film.
  
 
==Biography==
 
==Biography==
  
Biographical information about Bresson is incomplete and somewhat vague, as he was stingy with self-disclosure in the few interviews he permitted. Some reference works give his birth date as September 25, 1907, but there is some evidence that he was actually born six years earlier. He was born in Bromont-Lamhe, France, attended the Lycée Lakanal à Sceaux in Paris and received a bachelor of arts degree, and in December 1926 married Leidia van der Zee.
+
Biographical information about Bresson is incomplete and somewhat vague, as he was stingy with self-disclosure in the few interviews he permitted. Some reference works give his birth date as September 25, 1907, but it now seem that he was actually born six years earlier. He was born in Bromont-Lamhe, France, attended the Lycée Lakanal à Sceaux in Paris and received a bachelor of arts degree; in December 1926 married Leidia van der Zee.
  
 
Bresson studied painting and philosophy before he turned to film, and his first career was as a painter, from the 1920s to 1933. When he finally realized that he would never be a first rate painter, he turned to film instead, attempting to create an art of film.
 
Bresson studied painting and philosophy before he turned to film, and his first career was as a painter, from the 1920s to 1933. When he finally realized that he would never be a first rate painter, he turned to film instead, attempting to create an art of film.
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==Bresson's Cinematic Style==
 
==Bresson's Cinematic Style==
  
The slogan, seen on a claendar picture, "Vision is seeing more than is presented," could serve as an epigram for all of Bresson's films. Critics and commentators sometimes focus on content and plot, and Bresson's films do have that, but what they are most notable for is their cinematic style. Bresson wanted to show the viewer less, and thereby suggest more. He wanted the viewer to infer, imagine, and discover for himself, rather than see directly; to be an active agent instead of a passive recipient. The ax murder that ends ''L'Argent'', for example, is not shown—we see the bloody ax and see a dog running frantically through the building as it discovers the corpses.
+
The slogan, seen on a calendar picture, "Vision is seeing more than is presented," could serve as an epigram for all of Bresson's films. Critics and commentators sometimes focus on content and plot, and Bresson's films do have that, but what they are most notable for is their cinematic style. Bresson wanted to show the viewer less, and thereby suggest more. He wanted the viewer to infer, imagine, and discover for himself, rather than see directly; to be an active agent instead of a passive recipient. The ax murder that ends ''L'Argent'', for example, is not shown—we see the bloody ax and see a dog running frantically through the building as it discovers the corpses.
  
 
Bresson typically shows fragments of a scene in close-up: hands, feet, faces, a section of an apparatus or vehicle, a part of an animal. He has a fondness for doors and doorknobs, for windows and pieces of window frames, for stairs and elevators. Long shots—especially establishing shots—are rare in his films. Although his camera does move, its moves are subtle and do not call attention to themselves. Quite frequently, a scene is continued long after the action has stopped or moved on; another director would have cut the scene, but Bresson allows it to continue, as if forcing the viewer to meditate on what has just occurred or what might occur in the future.
 
Bresson typically shows fragments of a scene in close-up: hands, feet, faces, a section of an apparatus or vehicle, a part of an animal. He has a fondness for doors and doorknobs, for windows and pieces of window frames, for stairs and elevators. Long shots—especially establishing shots—are rare in his films. Although his camera does move, its moves are subtle and do not call attention to themselves. Quite frequently, a scene is continued long after the action has stopped or moved on; another director would have cut the scene, but Bresson allows it to continue, as if forcing the viewer to meditate on what has just occurred or what might occur in the future.
 +
 +
In addition to what he did with images, Bresson's original directoral language can be detected through his use of sound, associating selected sounds with images or characters; paring dramatic form to its essentials by the spare use of music; and through his infamous 'actor-model' methods of directing his almost exclusively non-professional actors.
  
 
A good insight into Bresson's films was given by David Thomson in the third edition of his ''Biographical Dictionary of Film''. He wrote:<blockquote>To see his films is to marvel that other directors have had the ingenuity to evolve such elaborate styles and yet restrict them to superficial messages. It might be said that watching Bresson is to risk conversion away from the cinema. His meaning is so clearly inspirational, and his treatment so remorselessly interior, that he shames the extrinsic glamour and extravagance of movies. For that reason alone he is not an easy director to digest.</blockquote>  
 
A good insight into Bresson's films was given by David Thomson in the third edition of his ''Biographical Dictionary of Film''. He wrote:<blockquote>To see his films is to marvel that other directors have had the ingenuity to evolve such elaborate styles and yet restrict them to superficial messages. It might be said that watching Bresson is to risk conversion away from the cinema. His meaning is so clearly inspirational, and his treatment so remorselessly interior, that he shames the extrinsic glamour and extravagance of movies. For that reason alone he is not an easy director to digest.</blockquote>  
 
Or, as Richard Corliss put it, in his overstated way, in his review of ''L'Argent'':<blockquote>Walking into a Robert Bresson film can be like walking up on top of Mount Everest: the air is thin and chilly, no living thing disturbs the silence, and the view is spectacularly disconcerting... Even the most adventurous viewer is advised to bring an oxygen mask. (Review of Cinema, "The Spring Collection from Paris," ''TIME'' 123:16 (April 16, 1984), 81.)</blockquote>
 
Or, as Richard Corliss put it, in his overstated way, in his review of ''L'Argent'':<blockquote>Walking into a Robert Bresson film can be like walking up on top of Mount Everest: the air is thin and chilly, no living thing disturbs the silence, and the view is spectacularly disconcerting... Even the most adventurous viewer is advised to bring an oxygen mask. (Review of Cinema, "The Spring Collection from Paris," ''TIME'' 123:16 (April 16, 1984), 81.)</blockquote>
 +
 +
Bresson's early artistic focus was to separate the language of cinema from the theatre, which often heavily involves the actor's performance to drive the work. With his 'actor-model' technique, Bresson's actors were required to repeat multiple takes of each scene until all semblances of 'performance' were stripped away, leaving a stark effect that registers as both subtle and raw, and one that can only be found in the cinema.
  
 
Attempts to capture Bresson's style in descriptive words have led to use of terms such as "pure cinema," "transcendental style," "simplicity," "minimalism," "elliptical film," "austerity," and even "dumb"—depending on whether the commentator liked or disliked it.
 
Attempts to capture Bresson's style in descriptive words have led to use of terms such as "pure cinema," "transcendental style," "simplicity," "minimalism," "elliptical film," "austerity," and even "dumb"—depending on whether the commentator liked or disliked it.
  
The severity and economy of Bresson's stule, his Catholicism and especially his Jansenism with its emphasis on predestination and grace, and his subject matter have led most critics and commentators to see Bresson as a religious filmmaker, not in the sense of adherence to or presentation of received dogma and religious institutions, but in the sense of being concerned with the spiritual, as an investigation of themes and concerns that touch on finding transcendence amid the mundaneness of earthly life.
+
The severity and economy of Bresson's style, his Catholicism and especially his Jansenism with its emphasis on predestination and grace, and his subject matter have led most critics and commentators to see Bresson as a religious filmmaker, not in the sense of adherence to or presentation of received dogma and religious institutions, but in the sense of being concerned with the spiritual, as an investigation of themes and concerns that touch on finding transcendence amid the mundaneness of earthly life.
 
 
Director, writer, and critic Paul Schrader has called his films "transcendental," although Bresson himself seems not to respond to that term. Critic and filmmaker  Susan Sontag wrote of what she called Bresson's "spiritual style," meaning that his films are a form of art that is detached and provokes reflection rather than art that directly arouses feelings.
 
  
 
One useful contrast is between the styles of Oliver Stone and Bresson because they are completely opposite. Stone's films are designed and executed in maximalist fashion to directly arouse feelings, whereas Bresson's go "through the route of intelligence," as Sontag put it, to evoke thought.
 
One useful contrast is between the styles of Oliver Stone and Bresson because they are completely opposite. Stone's films are designed and executed in maximalist fashion to directly arouse feelings, whereas Bresson's go "through the route of intelligence," as Sontag put it, to evoke thought.
  
 +
==Critical Assessment of Bresson's Work==
  
 +
Many film critics, directors, and cineastes (but definitely not all, John Simon being an important exception) say that Bresson is one of the greatest directors, and some consider him to be the greatest of all. Jean-Luc Godard has said of him, "Robert Bresson is French cinema, as Dostoyevsky is the Russian novel and Mozart is German music." Bresson was one of the heroes of the young French directors, such as François Truffaut and Godard, who constituted the French New Wave in the early 1960s.
  
 +
Critic Kent Jones compared Bresson's style to such modernist atonal composers as Schoenberg, Webern, or Messianen, saying that in their music emotion is always present, but it is an intellectual, reflective emotion rather than an immediately produced, unreflective, visceral one.
  
 
+
Critic and filmmaker Susan Sontag wrote of what she called Bresson's "spiritual style," meaning that his films are a form of art that is detached and provokes reflection rather than art that directly arouses feelings. Director, writer, and critic Paul Schrader has called Bresson's films "transcendental," although Bresson himself seems not to respond to that term. While Bresson was still living, Schrader declared that Bresson "is the most important spiritual artist living," now that painter Mark Rothko is dead. Rothko's paintings are also noted for the spareness of their expression—they are typically large canvases of strong color with a minimum of variation. Rothko's work was frequently said by commentators to evoke a spiritual dimension because of its spareness and because it tended to lift the viewer upward rather than cast him down. So it is, Schrader held, with the films of Bresson.
 
 
French director Robert Bresson (1901-1999) is often referred to as a 'patron saint' of cinema, not only for the strong Catholic themes found throughout his oeuvre, but also for his notable contributions to the art of film. His original directoral language can be detected through his use of sound, associating selected sounds with images or characters; paring dramatic form to its essentials by the spare use of music; and through his infamous 'actor-model' methods of directing his almost exclusively non-professional actors.  
 
 
 
Bresson's early artistic focus was to separate the language of cinema from the theatre, which often heavily involves the actor's performance to drive the work. With his 'actor-model' technique, Bresson's actors were required to repeat multiple takes of each scene until all semblances of 'performance' were stripped away, leaving a stark effect that registers as both subtle and raw, and one that can only be found in the cinema.  
 
  
 
Some feel that Bresson's Catholic upbringing and Jansenist belief-system lie behind the thematic structure of most of his films.  Recurring themes under this interpretation include salvation, redemption, defining and revealing the human soul, and metaphysical transcendence of a limiting and materialistic world.  An example is his 1956 feature ''A Man Escaped'', where a seemingly simple plot of a prisoner of war's escape can be read as a metaphor for the mysterious process of salvation.  
 
Some feel that Bresson's Catholic upbringing and Jansenist belief-system lie behind the thematic structure of most of his films.  Recurring themes under this interpretation include salvation, redemption, defining and revealing the human soul, and metaphysical transcendence of a limiting and materialistic world.  An example is his 1956 feature ''A Man Escaped'', where a seemingly simple plot of a prisoner of war's escape can be read as a metaphor for the mysterious process of salvation.  
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In 1975, Bresson published ''Notes sur le Cinématographe'' (''Notes on Cinematography''), in which he argued that cinematography is the higher function of cinema: whereas a movie is in essence "only" filmed theatre, cinematography is an attempt to create a new language of moving images and sounds via montage. By 'cinematography' Bresson meant not cinematography as it is usually used as a name for the process of making motion picture images on film with a motion picture camera, but for film creation and directing as he understood it. There he wrote, "The ideas, hide them, but so that one can find them. The most important will be the most hidden." Ambiguity is also frequently present: It is unclear, for example, whether Agnès dies at the end of ''Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne''.
 
In 1975, Bresson published ''Notes sur le Cinématographe'' (''Notes on Cinematography''), in which he argued that cinematography is the higher function of cinema: whereas a movie is in essence "only" filmed theatre, cinematography is an attempt to create a new language of moving images and sounds via montage. By 'cinematography' Bresson meant not cinematography as it is usually used as a name for the process of making motion picture images on film with a motion picture camera, but for film creation and directing as he understood it. There he wrote, "The ideas, hide them, but so that one can find them. The most important will be the most hidden." Ambiguity is also frequently present: It is unclear, for example, whether Agnès dies at the end of ''Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne''.
  
 +
Some of Bresson's comments in ''Notes on Cinematography'':<blockquote>[Speaking of what he wanted from his "models," as he called them, as opposed to professional actors.] The thing that matters is not what they show me but what they hide from me and, above all, ''what they do not suspect is in them''.</blockquote> <blockquote>To your models: "Speak as if you were speaking to yourselves." MONOLOGUE INSTEAD OF DIALOGUE.</blockquote>
  
 
==Availability of Bresson's Films==
 
==Availability of Bresson's Films==
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==External links==
 
==External links==
 +
*[http://www.mastersofcinema.org/bresson/TheNews.html News column of a website devoted to Bresson, Bresson's films, and critical assessment of Bresson]
 
*[http://www.robert-bresson.com/ Robert-Bresson.com: A comprehensive, fairly up-to-date internet resource dedicated to Bresson's films]
 
*[http://www.robert-bresson.com/ Robert-Bresson.com: A comprehensive, fairly up-to-date internet resource dedicated to Bresson's films]
 
* {{imdb name|name=Robert Bresson|id=0000975}}
 
* {{imdb name|name=Robert Bresson|id=0000975}}
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*[http://zakka.dk/euroscreenwriters/film_archive/bresson_robert.htm Rare interview footage with Bresson from French TV in 1960]
 
*[http://zakka.dk/euroscreenwriters/film_archive/bresson_robert.htm Rare interview footage with Bresson from French TV in 1960]
 
*[http://zakka.dk/euroscreenwriters/film_archive/bresson_robert_video02.htm Watch interview with Paul Schrader on Bresson and his film Pickpocket]
 
*[http://zakka.dk/euroscreenwriters/film_archive/bresson_robert_video02.htm Watch interview with Paul Schrader on Bresson and his film Pickpocket]
 +
*[http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/07/43/robert-bresson-dissenting.html A website presenting the dissenting view on Bresson of Dan Harper]
  
 
category:Art, music, literature, sports and leisure
 
category:Art, music, literature, sports and leisure

Revision as of 20:58, 16 June 2007

Robert Bresson (French IPA: [ʀɔ'bɛʀ bʀɛ'sɔ̃]) (September 25, 1901–December 18, 1999) was a French film director. Working within the medium of narrative cinema, he created a film grammar and syntax that was uniquely his own, although he had a significant influence on many others. Bresson dispensed with spectacle and drama in favor of a lean and minimalist cinematic style that points to spirituality and transcendence.

Bresson is often referred to as a "patron saint" of cinema, not only for the strong Catholic themes found throughout his oeuvre, but also for his notable contributions to the art of film.

Biography

Biographical information about Bresson is incomplete and somewhat vague, as he was stingy with self-disclosure in the few interviews he permitted. Some reference works give his birth date as September 25, 1907, but it now seem that he was actually born six years earlier. He was born in Bromont-Lamhe, France, attended the Lycée Lakanal à Sceaux in Paris and received a bachelor of arts degree; in December 1926 married Leidia van der Zee.

Bresson studied painting and philosophy before he turned to film, and his first career was as a painter, from the 1920s to 1933. When he finally realized that he would never be a first rate painter, he turned to film instead, attempting to create an art of film.

Bresson was a Roman Catholic and was heavily influenced by Jansenism, an ascetic form of Catholicism that stressed predestination and grace, much like the theology of the Protestant reformer John Calvin. Many film critics have seen in all of Bresson's film oeuvre the shadow of Jansenism's emphasis on those two concepts. The most striking example of that may be in the ending of his Diary of a Country Priest in which the final image—during or just after the death of the priest— shows a cross against a white background while on the soundtrack the words "All is grace" are heard.

Film Career

Bresson directed the now partly lost twenty five minute short film Affaires publiques in 1934. He wrote several screenplays for other directors, and served as assistant director to René Clair on Clair's unfinished film Air pur. He was a prisoner of war in Germany in 1940-41. After that, Bresson went on to make thirteen full-length features over the course of four decades.

In 1943, Bresson made his first feature, Les Anges du péché (Angels of Sin), with dialogue by Jean Giraudoux; set in a convent, this is a story of a nun who sacrifices her life to save the soul of a murderer. Bresson's next project, Les dames du Bois de Boulogne (1945), (Ladies of the Bois de Boulogne) was based on Denis Diderot's Jacques le fataliste et son maître with dialogue by Jean Cocteau, the latter providing one of the film's immemorial lines: "There is no love there is only proof of it."

In the 1950s he made Journal d'un curé de campagne (1950, in English Journal of a Country Priest), based on the novel by the same title by George Bernanos; Un condamné à mort s'est échappé (1956, A Man Escaped), based on Bresson's own prisoner of war experience and also on André Devigny's account of his own actual escape from a Nazi prison; and Pickpocket (1959).

In the 1960s Bresson made Procès de Jeanne d'Arc (1962, The Trial of Joan of Arc), using the actual trial transcript of the trial that still exists in the public records in Rouen; Au hasard, Balthazar (1966); Mouchette (1967), based on Bernanos's Nouvelle historie de Mouchette; and Une femme douce (1969, A Gentle Creature), based on a story by Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

In the 1970s he made Quatre nuits d'un rêveur (1971, Four Nights of a Dreamer), also based on a story by Dostoyevsky; Lancelot du Lac (1974, Lancelot of the Lake); and Le Diable probablement (1977, The Devil Probably), a story wholly original with Bresson.

Bresson's final film was L'Argent (1983, Money), based on a story by Leo Tolstoy.


Bresson's Cinematic Style

The slogan, seen on a calendar picture, "Vision is seeing more than is presented," could serve as an epigram for all of Bresson's films. Critics and commentators sometimes focus on content and plot, and Bresson's films do have that, but what they are most notable for is their cinematic style. Bresson wanted to show the viewer less, and thereby suggest more. He wanted the viewer to infer, imagine, and discover for himself, rather than see directly; to be an active agent instead of a passive recipient. The ax murder that ends L'Argent, for example, is not shown—we see the bloody ax and see a dog running frantically through the building as it discovers the corpses.

Bresson typically shows fragments of a scene in close-up: hands, feet, faces, a section of an apparatus or vehicle, a part of an animal. He has a fondness for doors and doorknobs, for windows and pieces of window frames, for stairs and elevators. Long shots—especially establishing shots—are rare in his films. Although his camera does move, its moves are subtle and do not call attention to themselves. Quite frequently, a scene is continued long after the action has stopped or moved on; another director would have cut the scene, but Bresson allows it to continue, as if forcing the viewer to meditate on what has just occurred or what might occur in the future.

In addition to what he did with images, Bresson's original directoral language can be detected through his use of sound, associating selected sounds with images or characters; paring dramatic form to its essentials by the spare use of music; and through his infamous 'actor-model' methods of directing his almost exclusively non-professional actors.

A good insight into Bresson's films was given by David Thomson in the third edition of his Biographical Dictionary of Film. He wrote:

To see his films is to marvel that other directors have had the ingenuity to evolve such elaborate styles and yet restrict them to superficial messages. It might be said that watching Bresson is to risk conversion away from the cinema. His meaning is so clearly inspirational, and his treatment so remorselessly interior, that he shames the extrinsic glamour and extravagance of movies. For that reason alone he is not an easy director to digest.

Or, as Richard Corliss put it, in his overstated way, in his review of L'Argent:

Walking into a Robert Bresson film can be like walking up on top of Mount Everest: the air is thin and chilly, no living thing disturbs the silence, and the view is spectacularly disconcerting... Even the most adventurous viewer is advised to bring an oxygen mask. (Review of Cinema, "The Spring Collection from Paris," TIME 123:16 (April 16, 1984), 81.)

Bresson's early artistic focus was to separate the language of cinema from the theatre, which often heavily involves the actor's performance to drive the work. With his 'actor-model' technique, Bresson's actors were required to repeat multiple takes of each scene until all semblances of 'performance' were stripped away, leaving a stark effect that registers as both subtle and raw, and one that can only be found in the cinema.

Attempts to capture Bresson's style in descriptive words have led to use of terms such as "pure cinema," "transcendental style," "simplicity," "minimalism," "elliptical film," "austerity," and even "dumb"—depending on whether the commentator liked or disliked it.

The severity and economy of Bresson's style, his Catholicism and especially his Jansenism with its emphasis on predestination and grace, and his subject matter have led most critics and commentators to see Bresson as a religious filmmaker, not in the sense of adherence to or presentation of received dogma and religious institutions, but in the sense of being concerned with the spiritual, as an investigation of themes and concerns that touch on finding transcendence amid the mundaneness of earthly life.

One useful contrast is between the styles of Oliver Stone and Bresson because they are completely opposite. Stone's films are designed and executed in maximalist fashion to directly arouse feelings, whereas Bresson's go "through the route of intelligence," as Sontag put it, to evoke thought.

Critical Assessment of Bresson's Work

Many film critics, directors, and cineastes (but definitely not all, John Simon being an important exception) say that Bresson is one of the greatest directors, and some consider him to be the greatest of all. Jean-Luc Godard has said of him, "Robert Bresson is French cinema, as Dostoyevsky is the Russian novel and Mozart is German music." Bresson was one of the heroes of the young French directors, such as François Truffaut and Godard, who constituted the French New Wave in the early 1960s.

Critic Kent Jones compared Bresson's style to such modernist atonal composers as Schoenberg, Webern, or Messianen, saying that in their music emotion is always present, but it is an intellectual, reflective emotion rather than an immediately produced, unreflective, visceral one.

Critic and filmmaker Susan Sontag wrote of what she called Bresson's "spiritual style," meaning that his films are a form of art that is detached and provokes reflection rather than art that directly arouses feelings. Director, writer, and critic Paul Schrader has called Bresson's films "transcendental," although Bresson himself seems not to respond to that term. While Bresson was still living, Schrader declared that Bresson "is the most important spiritual artist living," now that painter Mark Rothko is dead. Rothko's paintings are also noted for the spareness of their expression—they are typically large canvases of strong color with a minimum of variation. Rothko's work was frequently said by commentators to evoke a spiritual dimension because of its spareness and because it tended to lift the viewer upward rather than cast him down. So it is, Schrader held, with the films of Bresson.

Some feel that Bresson's Catholic upbringing and Jansenist belief-system lie behind the thematic structure of most of his films. Recurring themes under this interpretation include salvation, redemption, defining and revealing the human soul, and metaphysical transcendence of a limiting and materialistic world. An example is his 1956 feature A Man Escaped, where a seemingly simple plot of a prisoner of war's escape can be read as a metaphor for the mysterious process of salvation.

Bresson's films can also be understood as critiques of French society and the wider world, with each revealing the director's sympathetic if unsentimental view on its victims. That the main characters of Bresson's most contemporary films, L'Argent (1983) and The Devil, Probably (1977), reach similarly unsettling conclusions about life indicates to some the director's feelings towards the culpability of modern society in the dissolution of individuals. Indeed, of an earlier protagonist he said, "Mouchette offers evidence of misery and cruelty. She is found everywhere: wars, concentration camps, tortures, assassinations."


He has influenced a number of other film-makers, including Andrei Tarkovsky, Jim Jarmusch and Paul Schrader, whose book Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer (ISBN 0-306-80335-6) includes a detailed critical analysis.

Bresson's Notes on Cinematography

In 1975, Bresson published Notes sur le Cinématographe (Notes on Cinematography), in which he argued that cinematography is the higher function of cinema: whereas a movie is in essence "only" filmed theatre, cinematography is an attempt to create a new language of moving images and sounds via montage. By 'cinematography' Bresson meant not cinematography as it is usually used as a name for the process of making motion picture images on film with a motion picture camera, but for film creation and directing as he understood it. There he wrote, "The ideas, hide them, but so that one can find them. The most important will be the most hidden." Ambiguity is also frequently present: It is unclear, for example, whether Agnès dies at the end of Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne.

Some of Bresson's comments in Notes on Cinematography:

[Speaking of what he wanted from his "models," as he called them, as opposed to professional actors.] The thing that matters is not what they show me but what they hide from me and, above all, what they do not suspect is in them.

To your models: "Speak as if you were speaking to yourselves." MONOLOGUE INSTEAD OF DIALOGUE.

Availability of Bresson's Films

As a group, Bresson's films were long unavailable in North America. A few of them were available in poor prints, and some in video transfers that do not do justice to their original images. Thus, despite Bresson's international reputation, most of his films were unknown, or at least widely unavailable, to the English-speaking world. About 1998, the Cinémathèque Ontario in Toronto, in cooperation with the Bureau du Cinéma, Ministère des Affaires Etrangères, Paris, the Service Culturel du Consulat Général de France, Toronto, and Robert and Mylène Bresson (Robert's second wife—his first wife had died), saw to it that new 35mm prints were made of all the Bresson films and made possible a traveling retrospective exhibition of the complete Bresson-directed oeuvre. Today (Summer, 2007) eight of the Bresson Films are available from Netflix; the missing ones are Les Anges du péché, The Trial of Joan of Arc, Une Femme douce, Four Nights of a Dreamer, and The Devil Probably.


Filmography (as director)

  • L'Argent (1983 film)|L'argent (1983)
  • Le diable probablement (1977) - aka The Devil, Probably
  • Lancelot du Lac (film)|Lancelot du Lac (1974) - aka Lancelot of the Lake
  • Quatre nuits d'un rêveur (1971) - aka Four Nights of a Dreamer
  • Une femme douce (1969) - aka A Gentle Woman
  • Mouchette (1967)
  • Au hasard Balthazar|Balthazar (French title : Au hasard Balthazar) (1966)
  • Procès de Jeanne d'Arc (1962) - aka The Trial of Joan of Arc
  • Pickpocket (film)|Pickpocket (1959)
  • A Man Escaped|Un condamné à mort s'est échappé ou Le vent souffle où il veut (1956) - aka A Man Escaped
  • Journal d'un curé de campagne (1951) - aka Diary of a Country Priest
  • Les dames du Bois de Boulogne (1945)
  • Les Anges du péché (1943)
  • Les affaires publiques (1934)

Bibliography

By Robert Bresson

  • Notes on the Cinematographer

About Robert Bresson

  • Arnauld, Philippe, "Robert Bresson," Cahiers du cinema, 1986.
  • La politique des auteurs, edited by Andre Bazin. Interviews with Robert Bresson, Jean Renoir, Luis Buñuel, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, Fritz Lang, Orson Welles, Michelangelo Antonioni, Carl Theodor Dreyer and Roberto Rossellini
  • Cameron, Ian, ed., The Films of Robert Bresson, New York: Praeger Publishers, 1969.
  • Cunneen, Joseph, Robert Bresson: A Spiritual Style in Film
  • Eby, Lloyd, "Bresson, Master of the Minimal," The World & I, 14:7 (July 1999), 104-111.
  • Quandt, James, ed.,Robert Bresson (Cinematheque Ontario Monographs, No. 2)
  • Reader, Keith, Robert Bresson, Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2000.
  • Schrader, Paul, Transcendental Style in Film: Bresson, Ozu, Dreyer

External links

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