Robert Bresson

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.

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.

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. His 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).

Legacy

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.

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."

In 1975, Bresson published Notes sur le Cinématographe, 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.

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

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

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
Robert Bresson (Cinematheque Ontario Monographs, No. 2), edited by James Quandt
Transcendental Style in Film: Bresson, Ozu, Dreyer by Paul Schrader
Robert Bresson: A Spiritual Style in Film, by Joseph Cunneen
Robert Bresson, by Philippe Arnauld, Cahiers du cinema, 1986
The Films of Robert Bresson, Ian Cameron (ed.), New York: Praeger Publishers, 1969.
Robert Bresson, by Keith Reader, Manchester University Press, 2000.

External links

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