Four Nights of a Dreamer

By now, we are familiar with Robert Bresson's wonderful explanations of his work. In September 1970, while shooting his tenth feature film, Four Nights of a Dreamer, he said the following to Charles Thomas Samuels:

"I want the essence of my films to be not the words my people say or even the gestures they perform, but what these words and gestures provoke in them. What I tell them to do or say must bring to light something they had not realized they contained. The camera catches it; neither they nor I really knew it before it happens. The unknown is what I wish to capture."

There is a scene in Bruce Beresford/Horton Foote's Tender Mercies in which Robert Duvall (Mac Sledge) and Tess Harper (Rosa Lee) are alone in a field and he declares his love for her: "I guess it's no secret how I feel about you," he says. "A blind man could see that. Would you think about marrying me?" The moment comes as something of a surprise, since we're given nothing of a "build up" to it. It's treated like just another moment in the lives of these people of so few words - so few words that they turn to country songs for them.

The point is that, while they evidently feel strongly and deeply, the characters in Tender Mercies aren't given to, or equipped for, strong demonstrations of feeling. Once we have made the adjustment that forces us, if we are to care about them, to infer what isn't shown or enunciated by these people, Tender Mercies becomes a very moving and masterfully directed film.

The films of Robert Bresson make the very same demands of an audience when he is AT HIS BEST, in Diary of a Country Priest, A Man Escaped, Mouchette, and Une Femme Douce. But I had to remind myself of it when, on the "Second Night" in Four Nights of a Dreamer, sitting on a street curb, Jacques says to Marthe, "How many times I was in love!" Marthe replies, "How is that? With whom?" Bresson shows us Jacques walking the streets aimlessly, until he sees a pretty girl and follows her, peering through a shop window, waiting, following her again when she leaves the shop, then passing another girl, and, looking back at the first girl, he follows the second. "With no one, an ideal, the woman in my dream." Marthe: "That's stupid." Jacques: "Yes. And God sends me an angel to show me. To reconcile me to myself." Despite my familiarity with the Dostoevsky story and the 1957 Visconti adaptation of it, Jacques's words arrive out of nowhere.

An art school friend (who resembles Heath Ledger) shows up at Jacques' flat and launches into an unprovoked harangue:

"What's crucial is not the object, not the painter, but the gesture which lifts the presence from the object, and is suspended in a space which delimits it, and, in fact, supports it. Not the object there, not the painter there, but the object and the painter which are not there."

Bresson was a painter, and these remarks are consistent with others he has made about film (see above). Perhaps he is instructing the viewer how to properly interpret his film? The scene merely reminded me of Bresson's fascinating interviews whenever one of his films was released, making somewhat gnomic statements that only seemed to deepen the audience's mystification. Sometimes Bresson made it seem that his defense of his style was more interesting than the style itself.

"White Nights," is a story by Dostoevsky published in 1848, the year before his arrest and exile to Siberia. In Constance Garnett's translation, its subtitle is "a sentimental story from the diary of a dreamer". Written in the first person, it's about a lonely young man's encounter with a forlorn young woman who has a sad story to tell. "From early morning I had been oppressed by a strange despondency. It suddenly seemed to me that I was lonely, that every one was forsaking me and going away from me." Visconti adapted the story to film in 1957, but the film's artificiality (its snowy cityscape was filmed entirely in Cinecittá), plus an insufferable performance by Maria Schell, made it hard to take in. (Jean Marais looked like he was in physical pain during some of the love scenes with Schell.)

As in Une Femme Douce, in which Dominique Sanda plays certain carefully chosen records to avail us of her emotional state, in Four Nights of a Dreamer, Marthe turns on her radio to a Brazilian sambalero as she disrobes and examines her lovely body in the mirror. And later, by the Seine, Jacques and Marthe listen to a similar samba played by a combo on a tourist bateau ivre as it winds slowly through Paris. Bresson cuts to the combo on the boat performing the song. Of course, the length of the scene suggests that the boat must be moving incredibly slowly for Jacques and Marthe to hear the whole song, but it's an otherwise transcendent moment in the film, the sensual music contributing a further dimension to Jacques and Marthe's desire and longing.

But the film adds up to so little. Bresson's previous two films, Mouchette and Une Femme Douce, so utterly different in tone and texture, are resolved by suicides. When we meet Marthe, she is preparing to throw herself from the Pont Neuf into the Seine. It is the only indication, really, of the depth of her feelings of desertion. Her cheeks are covered in tears as Jacques walks her home. I found it especially puzzling that Marthe's mother, a minor character (but so what?) is barely sketched in by Bresson, despite the fact that she had to be embodied by a flesh and blood person (Lidia Biondi), reduced by Bresson to a kind of depersonalized dummy. When Marthe discovers that the boarder is leaving without her mother telling her, she impulsively packs a bag, enters his room and demands that he take her with him (to Yale, he tells her, on a fellowship). He closes the door, locks it, and commences to undress her. Meanwhile, Marthe's mother calls out to her and Bresson, having to show us that her mother is looking for her in the tiny apartment, puts in a few shots of the mother walking back and forth through a doorway, calling out "Marthe?" Finally naked (just as she was moments before in the film in front of her mirror), Marthe is embraced by him. The shots of Marthe's mother were unnecessary. We could hear her footsteps and her calling out to Marthe. But one could argue that the film is made up of such perfunctory shots. At the opening of the film, Jacques hitchhikes to the country, and Bresson shows us his boyish pleasure at being there by having his actor roll through a meadow and saunter along the road, swinging his arms and humming a tune. These aren't identifiable emotions - Bresson's actors almost never "emote." They are indications of emotions, stripped of their meaning. When Bresson attempted his esthetic approach in Au Hasard, Bathazar with a donkey, he at least could use the excuse that even when a donkey is being highly expressive, how is anyone but a donkey handler going to know? Dostoevsky's narrator says, "I took long walks, succeeding, as I usually did, in quite forgetting where I was, when I suddenly found myself at the city gates. Instantly I felt lighthearted, and I passed the barrier and walked between cultivated fields and meadows, unconscious of fatigue, and feeling only all over as though a burden were falling off my soul. All the passers-by gave me such friendly looks that they seemed almost greeting me, they all seemed so pleased at something. They were all smoking cigars, every one of them. And I felt pleased as I never had before. It was as though I had suddenly found myself in Italy—so strong was the effect of nature upon a half-sick townsman like me, almost stifling between city walls." Dostoevsky goes a great deal further into the narrator's inner life, but the closest Bresson can get to it is Jacques's tape recorder, with which he records the story of his pursuit of an ideal woman, which he plays back to himself as a substitute, I suppose, for an interior monologue. The scenes of Jacques painting, with his canvases on the floor, make it seem like he uses it as therapy. Frustrated, perhaps disappointed at life, at Marthe's rushing into the arms of her former lover the moment he reappears on the Pont Neuf (as promised a year before). But perhaps Bresson would tell me that I'm editorializing?

Rosetta

The filmmaking Brothers Dardenne, Luc & Jean-Pierre, have been around longer than their much-deserved fame. After creating their own production company, Derives, in 1975, they made dozens of documentaries for television and their first feature film - ironically called Falsch - with Bruno Cremer in 1987. But it was not until their third film, La Promesse (1996) that the Dardennes attracted international attention. To date they have made ten films, with an eleventh in production, and every one of them since La Promesse has won awards at international film festivals and inspired intense discussion among cinephiles.

Three years after La Promesse, the Dardennes finally arrived at their fourth film, Rosetta (1999). Intensely anticipated by everyone wanting to see if the brothers could reward the promise of La Promesse, Rosetta was a powerful and quite unsettling portrait of a young girl who has known nothing of winning in her life, who is buffetted from one defeat after another. From the very beginning of Rosetta, the moment she enters the frame, through a door at a factory, wearing a lab coat and a hair net, she is in a hurry. The camera can hardly keep up with her as she makes her way through a bustling factory to confront the person who got her fired her from her job. Whatever their reasons for firing her (and we can infer the reason), she won't accept it. She punches the man who tells her her "trial period" is over and that she has to go. She runs from the police who arrive to remove her. It's a common enough occurrence in every business in every society - the firing of an employee - and a potentially dangerous one, as long as there is no such thing as job security and the nightmare of unemployment hangs over everyone's head.

Rosetta is in a hurry to survive. Living with an alcoholic mother in a trailer park, we don't know whatever hard knocks preceded our introduction to her. All we know is that, as lousy as her life is, she has to fight to keep it from getting lousier. Some of us learn to hope for the best but to prepare for the worst. Rosetta expects the worst. When a young man named Riquet, who works at a waffle stand, arrives at her trailer park to tell her there's a job opening, she attacks him, thinking he got her address from the employment office. He's a decent enough guy, and he gives her a place to sleep and shower after she gives up on her mother for the nth time. But she is so untrusting, so unwilling to believe in anyone's goodwill, even if the goodwill is utterly impersonal, that she returns his friendship with betrayal.

Rosetta's life is such a never-ending disaster that one wonders if she is making it that way - that she is suffering from a mental illness of some kind. Her mother pushes her into a pond and she nearly drowns. Later, when Riquet falls into the same pond, rather than help him out, she runs away. Since no one helped her, she can't help him. It's Life, isn't it, that can't be helped. When she musters enough humanity to save him, and she discovers that he hasn't rejected her as a friend, she turns him in to his boss at the waffle stand, hoping it will help her own chances of replacing him. Riquet wants to know why, and pursues her on his motorbike. At the last, when he doesn't give up circling her on his bike, and she falls, crying, on the ground, he helps her to her feet. She looks at him, defiant to the last. The film abruptly stops there.

In his review of the film, Stanley Kauffmann raised a serious objection:

"The ceaseless fight for survival is in fact the firmest note in the picture. Since Rosetta never stops hating and fighting, no matter what happens, her struggle becomes a harsh tribute to inner strength... But this relatively unvaried tone takes its toll on the film. In La Promesse the spiritual degradation was much the same, even though the boy and his father were comparatively prosperous, but the film moved to some wisp of hope for the boy. Rosetta is trapped, trapped throughout. A closing dash of Technicolor uplift would have been an atrocity. (The change in La Promesse was organic, true.) But the lack of even a catastrophe at the end of Rosetta, let alone uplift, turns the film into a dossier, the chronicle of a case. Once again the Dardennes are, quite obviously, greatly moved by the people with whom they deal, and they present the girl with insistent candor. But this time they have treated their subject as if they were making a documentary; and since it is fiction, their film leaves us with a sense of incompleteness, which La Promesse certainly did not. One wry truth about art is that it needs a little arrangement in order to seem unarranged."

I'm not certain what Kauffmann wanted from Rosetta. The imposition of a design of any kind on the story would've been disastrous. Kauffmann, evidently, saw a kind of redemption in the closing moments of La Promesse that is missing from Rosetta. For reasons that, I think, are entirely spurious, the Dardennes' films are often compared to certain works of Robert Bresson. Rosetta was linked to Mouchette, which was based on a novel by Roman Catholic writer Georges Bernanos. Mouchette is beset with adversities similar to Rosetta's - the brutality or the total indifference of the world around her drive her to a fatal conclusion. And Bresson closes his film, as Mouchette drowns herself, with Monteverdi's Magnificat. The terms of the life that Rosetta must live are equally uncompromising. So how could the film compromise? Her mother pushes her into a pond and she almost drowns, but the thought of drowning herself would never occur to her, despite there being no light at the end of the tunnel that is her life. If there is anything to be learned from the film, it is the vanity of expecting to see a light in the first place.

But there is something more to Kauffmann's point about the "little arrangement" that art is supposed to provide to life, and it goes to the heart of the argument about naturalism in films. Here is Vernon Young, in his analysis of another naturalistic film, Umberto D.

"the film may easily be construed as an artless and unbuttered slice of life, a testimony of naturalism: ostensibly a method of expressing reality without inhibition, without overtones and as far as possible without style. Nothing could be further from the case. Like Shoeshine or Bicycle Thief, and with justification even more subtle, De Sica's Umberto D. - a masterpiece of compassion which he has dedicated to his father - might be termed supernaturalism if this compound had not been preempted for another kind of experience entirely. The fidelity of De Sica's attention to the plight of the man Umberto, realistic in its living details, is enriched by a host of modulations working under and through the story line, so delicately registered as to be imperceptible save to that second awareness evoked from most spectators without their being able to define it."

De Sica's artful resolution to the climax of Umberto D. (the old man distracted from his attempt at suicide by his little dog) satisfies viewers - as much as it's possible to be satisfied. Rosetta is 17, but she is as much beaten by life as Umberto - though she will never admit it. Riquet follows her half out of anger but half out of curiosity as well. Having finally landed a job, she comes home to find her mother passed out drunk on the ground near their trailer. She manages to get her inside and in bed, and then she phones her boss to tell him she won't be coming back to work. Why? Like Riquet, we are baffled by her choices, which always seem to be forced out of her. She strikes out at life before it can strike her. Watching her grapple so desperately but indefatigably with her life is a terrifying rebuke of all of our welfare states with their safety nets that are supposed to catch the ones among us who just can't manage to make it, no matter how hard they try. It is its portrait of Rosetta's strength, her ability to get knocked down and get back up again time after time, that is the film's great achievement.


(1) Stanley Kauffmann, "Two Teenage Girls," The New Republic, November 29, 1999.
(2) Vernon Young, "Umberto D.: Vittorio De Sica's Super-naturalism," The Hudson Review, Vol. VIII, No. 4 [Winter, 1956].

Remastering the Film

When Charles Thomas Samuels (1936-1974) was writing his unfinished book, Mastering the Film, which was to be his overview of film from the perspective of its greatest directors, he arrived at a list of twelve filmmakers, each of whom had created at least two great films and had arrived at an individual style. The twelve filmmakers were Antonioni, Bergman, Bresson, Clair, De Sica, Fellini, Hitchcock, Olmi, Reed, Renoir, Truffaut, and Vigo.

The structure of Samuels' book appeared to force some of his choices upon him. His prejudices took care of the rest. For example, Samuels was honest enough to admit to feeling "deracinated" by the work of Asian filmmakers, and disqualified himself from passing judgement on them. Clearly, Jean Vigo did not live long enough to show us the full extent of his gifts. What remains is tantalizing but ultimately unsatisfying. I agree with Vernon Young's assessment of the work of René Clair, which he epitomized as "champagne on corn flakes." My own estimation of Bresson's work is common knowledge to readers of this blog. I would add that his hatred of actors is typical of filmmakers who insist on absolute control of every aspect of the creative process. Antonioni hated actors as much as Bresson, but at least he recognized that he needed their contribution to his work. The less said about Hitchcock, the better. His influence on the work of Truffaut was deleterious in the extreme.

Due perhaps to a lack of enthusiasm from publishers, the reception of his book of interviews with many of the his chosen filmmakers, Encountering Directors (1), and his own unforgiving self-criticism, ultimately resulting in his suicide, Samuels came nowhere near to finishing Mastering the Film. Tantalizing fragments were published posthumously both in his honor and to provide financial relief for his surviving wife and children.

I hang on to the memory of Samuels if only because film criticism on the level at which he was writing for publications like The American Scholar and The Hudson Review remains extremely rare, and because, knowing the lengths of his commitment to what he wrote and what he was writing about, I know that I will never be as good a critic as he was.

The following exchange between Samuels and Michelangelo Antonioni, included in Encountering Directors, reveals just how much Samuels expected of film, and one of the reasons that his splendid book was so slighted by journalistic reviewers:

Samuels: By the end of L'avventura, Sandro recognizes that his promiscuity is harmful to Claudia, with whom he has had the one intense relationship of his life, so far as we know. Do you mean us to believe that his ensuing guilt (inspiring him to tears) is an error because what makes him feel this guilt are conceptions of romantic love and personal responsibility that have become irrelevant burdens?

Antonioni: Sandro is a character from a film shot in 1960 and is therefore entirely immersed in such moral problems. He is an Italian, a Catholic, and so he is a victim of this morality. What I said awhile ago is that such moral dilemmas will have no right to exist in a future that will be different from the present. Today we are just beginning to glimpse that future, but in 1960 we lived in a country with the Pope and the Vatican, which have always been extremely important to all of us. There isn't a school in Italy still, not a law court without its crucifix. We have Christ in our houses, and hence the problem of conscience, a problem fed to us as children that afterward we have no end of trouble getting rid of. All the characters in my films are fighting these problems, needing freedom, trying to find a way to cut themselves loose, but failing to rid themselves of conscience, a sense of sin, the whole bag of tricks.

Samuels: I don't think you're proposing something that's only a matter of time. Would it indeed ever be good to dispense with the bag of tricks, as you call it? I wonder if we shouldn't be more proud of this tradition going back to Homer than of the trip to the moon. Speaking only for myself-no, I'm sure I speak for others, too-the ending of L'avventura is so powerful because Sandro has the conscience to regret what he has done. To feel such regret, one has to believe in the supreme importance of human responsibility, and I can't conceive of art without that belief.

I could not begin to write as comprehensive a study as Samuels devised. But if I were to come up with my own list of filmmakers to include in such a study, it would look like the following.

Gianni Amelio (b. 1945)
Michelangelo Antonioni (1912-2007)
Bruce Beresford (b. 1940)
Ingmar Bergman (1918-2007)
Jean-Pierre Dardenne (b. 1951) Luc Dardenne (b. 1954)
Federico Fellini (1920-1993)
Shohei Imamura (1926-2006)
Hirokazu Koreeda (b. 1962)
Akira Kurosawa (1910-1998)
Yasujiro Ozu (1903-1963)
Jean Renoir (1894-1979)
Vittorio De Sica (1901-1074)
Bertrand Tavernier (b. 1941)
Jan Troell (b. 1931)
Zhang Yimou (b. 1951)


Several filmmakers who did not make my list, for one or another reason, would make my list of Honorable Mentions: Claude Autant-Lara, Robert Bresson, Luis Buñuel, Claude Chabrol, Kon Ichikawa, Masaki Kobayashi, David Lean, Louis Malle, Ermanno Olmi, François Truffaut, Carol Reed, Andrzej Wajda, and Lina Wertmuller. I will expound on my choices next week.


(1) In his interview with Bresson, Samuels quoted a proverb that best explains the critical reception of Encountering Directors: "A jackass can look into a mirror, but a philosopher can't look back."

Diary of a Country Priest

[Just to show my readers (all two of you) that I am not entirely insensitive to the delicacy and beauty of which Robert Bresson was sometimes capable, I offer a piece I published at Senses of Cinema in 2003. Even if I still think that Bresson's too-convincing portrait of our soulless world makes nonsense of his priest's dying words ("all is grace"), perhaps it was merely Bernanos' point in the novel, which I haven't read. Peter Cowie claimed that Bresson was "agnostic," which must be the silliest claim ever made for him. Bresson was about as agnostic as Pascal or Dostoevsky. Besides, agnostics don't say things like "there are no real atheists." Maybe Cowie was trying to say that Bresson was not a practising Catholic. Allowing for Bresson being French (notoriously wayward Catholics), the most I would credit him with would be something more akin to a skeptical Catholicism.]


For the uninitiated (somehow, the ecclesiastical word novitiate springs to mind), Robert Bresson must certainly seem the most demanding filmmaker who ever lived. "Austerely Roman Catholic," as he has so often been characterized, he sought after effects in his work that cannot properly be quantified. Bresson operated under the assumption that there was such a thing as a "soul," and that, through extreme concentration of style, it could be revealed to the camera and the tape recorder – instruments that, to him, had an almost incantatory power. His films, from the 1943 Les Anges du péché until L'Argent in 1983, were testaments to the austerity of his faith and his equally austere technique. Refusing to yield to anything resembling audience appeal or entertainment values, he managed to create for himself a quiet, unostentatious niche in the history of French cinema, earning the grudging respect of critics and slowly acquiring an audience of acolytes.

The Diary of a Country Priest (1950) was first a celebrated novel published in 1936 by the prominent Catholic writer Georges Bernanos, who died in 1948. Bresson managed to get the rights to a film adaptation from Bernanos' estate and turned it into his first masterpiece. As he admitted, in a highly rewarding interview with Charles Thomas Samuels:

I don't share Bernanos' faith and style. But in every book of his there are sparks, remarkable insights, that are very peculiar and that you do not find in other writers. In The Diary of a Country Priest there are many such sparks…. In [my film] I wasn't faithful to the style of Bernanos, and I omitted details which I disliked. But I was faithful to the spirit of the book and to what it inspired in me as I read it. (1)

Although the film's theme is religious, it is in no way a strictly religious film. The suffering that the priest endures, and the pettiness and intolerance he witnesses all around are for him simply evidence of the "grace" promised by his faith. And what prevents the priest from seeming like a creeping Jesus is that, from the moment we see his face, it is obvious that he is stricken.

Bresson's concentration of the gentle and poetic face of his non-actor Claude Laydu – who plays the priest – and his use of the somewhat quaint narrative device of the priest's entries in his diary, give the film an impetus and a very telling window on the deterioration of his health and mind. In the film's greatest scene – and one of the most magnificent scenes of spiritual transformation on film – the priest manages to help a woman overcome her grief for her dead child and her hatred of God for his death. Although professedly chary of using symbols, Bresson placed a groundskeeper outside the Countess' chateau raking leaves throughout the scene – and the sound of the dead leaves being gathered as the Countess at last releases her grief is a powerful metaphor. But even this act of kindness from the priest results in disaster – the Countess dies in her sleep that very night and the priest is held responsible, even by his fellow Priest of Torcy.

Bresson is relentless in capturing the squalid daily routines of the provincial setting. Though often regarded as the dramatization of a spiritual journey, the film is remarkably sensuous in its details. Bresson enlisted Abel Gance's cinematographer, Léonce-Henry Burel, to give the exterior shots (especially the somewhat fantastic night scenes) an especially startling realism. And Bresson's choice of his non-professional 'non-actors' is almost perfect, even down to the casting of the children who themselves cannot resist taunting the priest. Especially noteworthy is Marie-Monique Arkell as the Countess, who would never make another film.

But there is also irony in the priest's last line in the film, related to us by a friend who witnesses his last moments. The world through which this sickly priest wanders so purposefully is proof that indeed all is not grace; that, while one may make spiritual contact with another human being and make it past the obstacles of his own pain and sorrow, the world continues to be what it is – not a fit place for someone who can summarise existence with the final aphorism “All is grace.”

Surely no other filmmaker – and certainly no great filmmaker – demands as much close reading and is as well known for his comments on his work as Bresson. In fact, his artistic approach would practically be incomprehensible without his wonderfully strange and uncompromising view of Film. (2)

The following, significant exchange from an interview with Charles Thomas Samuels, provides an appropriate summation of Bresson's views:

Samuels: I think that many of your ideas are a consequence of your Christianity. Am I right in saying that you pursue mystery without worrying that the audience will be baffled because you believe that we all partake of one essential soul?
Bresson: Of course. Of course.
S: So that every viewer is fundamentally the same viewer.
B: Of course. What I am very pretentiously trying to capture is this essential soul, as you call it.
S: Do you believe that there is anybody that does not partake in this essential soul. For example, is an atheist outside your audience?
B: No, he is not. Besides, there are no real atheists.

(1) Charles Thomas Samuels, Encountering Directors (New York: G.P. Putnam & Sons, 1972).
(2) Bresson collected his writings in Notes on Cinematography (New York: Urizen Books, 1975).

The Passion of the Joan or The Emperor's New Nudity

When Robert Bresson's curious pronouncements on his highly individual art first began to appear in the 1950s, critics were fascinated because his results were so dazzling. What he subsequently proved was that it didn't matter what his working practices were as long as they worked, as they did in Diary of a Country Priest (1950) and A Man Escaped (1956). When they didn't work, those same ideas weren't exactly invalidated, but it called Bresson's application of them into question. What critics noticed was that Bresson's minimalist mania was not so noticeable when it suited the subject, when his elimination of everything but the essential elements of expression seemed totally apposite to the material. A priest slowly dying in a soulless world or a condemned prisoner of war carefully plotting and executing his escape needed precisely the approach that Bresson brought to them.

One wonders what, if any, style could have redeemed the story of a petty thief with a Raskolnikov complex. (1) With Pickpocket (1959), Bresson seemed to follow his principles straight off a cliff. It was the first proof that his style was extremely limited. But if Pickpocket was cause for concern, his next film was cause for grief. Late in his life, Chuck Jones, animator of Bugs Bunny, Road Runner, and Tom & Jerry, among many others, complained that most of the "animation" being practiced on children's cartoons was little more than "illustrated radio." Bresson's Trial of Joan of Arc is not even good radio. And the Madame Tussaud wax exhibit is more animate than Bresson's Joan.

Depending on which axe one chooses to grind, Joan of Arc was wither a saint, a witch or a madwoman at one time or another in her brief life. I think it is safe to say that she was neither a saint or a witch, however much she may have tried to be either. And her testimony from her trial, which is a fascinating historical document in itself, is proof against insanity. I think that she believed in her voices and visions, but only because she was living in the 15th century, when such things were not uncommon. The difference, of course, is that Joan's voices were pro-French and anti-English, which is why her captors (the English) found it necessary to burn her at the stake. She quickly became a legend to the French, and many of them still believe in the stories of her military exploits. (2) To the British, she was the object of obscene rumors for centuries. She was canonized in 1920, and an astonishing film was made about her trial and execution, Carl-Theodore-Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc, in 1928. Bresson thought so little of Dreyer's accomplishment that he thought he could top it. I cannot imagine anyone is his right mind who would think so. Obviously, when one claims, as Bresson did, that one's films have nothing in common with any others, it makes comparisons impossible. If I were to insists that, frame by frame, Dreyer's film is superior to Bresson's, he would have accused me of being so inured to theatrical films that use sets and actors that I was unqualified to properly judge his work. Too many critics have gone for this bait and insisted on treating Bresson's work as if it existed in a vacuum, leaving them nothing with which to compare it. The fact is, Bresson made two films that are undeniably excellent, that provide a standard with which to compare all his other films.

Trial of Joan of Arc uses the very same text that Dreyer used, the words spoken by Joan and her judges, transcribed from the trial itself. Bresson, always avoiding dramatic devices like the plague, shot his film invariably at middle distance from the "action," with utterly flat, television lighting. A typical shot features several people, all looking in the same direction (except Florence Carrez, who is usually staring at the floor), with one person doing all the talking and the others sitting stock-still as if petrified, their only concession to nature being the occasional involuntary blinking of their eyes. Bresson always insisted that this isn't the least bit stylized and that this is how human beings really behave. Since none of his non-actors has an interesting face, Bresson often concentrates on their backs and is as fixated on feet and shoes as Bunuel. (3)

At one point, Bresson uses a single shot of Joan lying supine on a table, surrounded by priests, which is supposed to suggest that she had been tortured. Bresson shot it that way in order to avoid the fakery of having to stage Joan's torture. But what about the fakery of Florence Carrez got up like Joan of Arc in men's clothing and a bunch of talentless French people re-enacting her trial and execution? Bresson was merely being selective with his fakery.

Bresson utilizes one shot, though from a different angle, that directly recalls the Dreyer film: when a white-clad priest extends a cross to Joan on the stake. In the Dreyer film it was Antonin Artaud who performs this beautiful gesture, which in the Bresson is reduced to the barest minimum of feeling and meaning.

In his superb 2003 commentary for the Criterion DVD edition of Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest, Peter Cowie states that "Poor Bresson has been tarred with many a brush. So many film buffs assume that one has to be an ardent Catholic believer in order to appreciate his cinema." But being a religious believer is not what Bresson's cinema requires of one. What his work requires is a conversion to Robert Bresson and his exhaustively exclusive theories on the art of film. It requires one to become a subject of Hans Christian Andersen's naked emperor - in reverse. Bresson's emperor knows that he is naked - in fact his nakedness is a matter of principle. And his subjects, who reject every other emperor who wears even the most glorious and shimmering raiment, cheer their emperor's pallid and emaciated body in self-flagellating ecstasy.


(1) Bresson had an unrequited passion for Dostoevsky.
(2) As Luc Besson's ludicrous The Messenger (1999) demonstrates.
(3) On her way to the stake, Bresson shows us only Joan's bare feet and the feet of the crowd, and he even stoops to having one of them try to trip Joan as she shuffles past.

Style as Meaning (Part I)

While I must admit to having found Jun Ichikawa's 2004 film Tony Takitani strangely beautiful, it is additionally remarkable for having so little that is edifying to say about its characters or the world it glances at - the word explores simply doesn't fit. It moved Stanley Kauffmann to write: "The effect is strange: it makes the director the protagonist of his picture. We cannot be much moved or amused by the leading characters: we are held only by the way the picture is made, thus by the intelligence that created this style. Not many of us, I think, would want to see many films made this way, possibly not one more, but this one is an intriguing glance at the director-as-god, deigning to treat human frailty with imperial sway, assuming that his art justifies this slender material." (8.15.05)

What struck me about the comment was how Kauffmann could have been writing about the entire oeuvre of Robert Bresson. To be fair, I found Ichikawa's film more moving for its use of genuine actors.

Bresson

Senses of Cinema was nice enough to publish something I wrote earlier in the year on Robert Bresson that I titled "Sins of Omission: A Dissenting View"

I wrote the piece in some haste and submitted it without a chance to edit it. Next thing I hear from Senses editor Rolando Caputo is that he'd sent it to the web designers for publication. I had already written a revised version of the piece, and sent it along to Rolando. But there was nothing he could do with it.

So here is the revised piece that I wrote. It's a much more strongly-argued and ultimately more devastating view of Bresson. While admiring many of Bresson's films, I felt somehow compelled to publish a rejoinder when confronted by all of the intolerable (and nonsensical) cant that's been written about him for going on fifty years now.


Robert Bresson, Photography, and Cinematographie

“A film cannot be a stage show, because a stage show requires flesh-and-blood presence. But it can be, as photographed theater or CINEMA is, the photographic reproduction of a stage show. The photographic reproduction of a stage show is comparable to the photographic reproduction of a painting or a sculpture. But a photographic reproduction of Donatello’s Saint John the Baptist or of Vermeer’s Young Woman with Necklace has not the power, the value or the price of that sculpture or that painting. It does not create it. Does not create anything.”[i]

“Cinematography, the art, with images, of representing nothing.”[ii]

Robert Bresson liked to remember it otherwise, but his career in film began (even if we overlook the 1934 star vehicle for Beby the Clown, Public Affairs) in the conventional way. And though he later admitted that he learned from the beginning the underlying falsity of film “acting”,[iii] his first two films, Les Anges du Peche (Angels of Sin, 1943) and Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (1946), employed professional actors, and Bresson managed to extract superb performances from them.[iv] But the experience of working under conditions that he believed were a betrayal of the true nature of film made him decide to follow his instincts and commit himself to a radical departure from conventional practice.

Exactly what elements of conventional filmmaking did Bresson regard as foreign to its esthetics? He has stated flatly that “For me, filmmaking is combining images and sounds of real things in an order that makes them effective. What I disapprove of is photographing with that extraordinary instrument – the camera – things that are not real. Sets and actors are not real.”[v] This would seem to be an insistence on documentary-like verism, if we are to take literally his notion of “real things”. But while eventually eschewing sets and actors, Bresson, with an odd exactitude, maintained the practice of placing people before a camera as proxies in a drama of his own invention. And his stories invariably reflect an implicit faith in the imperilment – and sometimes salvation – of souls.

Bresson’s first daring attempts at realizing his bold new thesis were dazzling. Working exclusively with non-professionals, Bresson accomplished an inimitable adaptation of Georges Bernanos’ novel The Diary of a Country Priest (Le Journal d’un Cure de Campagne,1950), and one of the greatest of all French films, A Man Escaped (Un Condamne a Mort s’est Echappe, 1956). These two films are extraordinary for many reasons – the most significant of which is their dependence on the barest minimum of means. By strenuously controlling the impulse for effects, Bresson achieved much with very little, and earned the respect of critics and filmmakers everywhere.

Whatever cachet Bresson earned with those two films was seriously taxed, however, when he made Pickpocket (1959). What had been a perfectly apposite marriage of style and meaning had become a discordant conflict in which both seemed arbitrary, rather than right. Critics[vi] were quick to place the blame on Bresson’s choice of subject – exchanging the problems of a cancer-stricken priest and a condemned prisoner for those of a stodgy criminal with delusions of grandeur. Comparisons to Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov were unhelpful, since a petty thief has little in common with an ax-murderer. Bresson failed to ennoble Martin Lasalle’s skill sufficiently to make his eventual arrest and spiritual awakening either interesting or convincing. [vii]

It was also about this time that the first studies of Bresson began to appear, containing his own remarks about film. Filmmakers, children of the modern age, have been especially susceptible to conflating errant arguments for their work[viii] (I won’t go into the effects of “film scholarship”). And few filmmakers survive what Stanley Kauffmann recently called the “Age of the Larynx.”[ix]

In 1975, Bresson finally published his Notes sur la cinematographie – in his own words, “a gathering of notes on little pieces of paper, on cigarette wrappers; things I wrote down while shooting or on some other occasion.”[x] It is a slim volume, only 72 pages in the Urizen edition, but it contains much that is essential to any complete understanding of Bresson’s intentions, if not always his results.[xi] It is also a corrective to all of the ideas and statements mistakenly attributed to him.[xii] One detail is made abundantly clear by the book: Bresson was a painter – of what school hasn’t been divilged, but it is easy to guess from his statements about art that he was decidedly post-expressionist. His contempt for the theater and for photography, the two stools between which Bresson believed nearly all films fall, derives from a modernist painter’s mistrust of representation of any sort, whether it is an actor’s pretense of real emotion and the “suspension of disbelief” that it requires, and a photographer’s stolen moments. The quotes at the beginning of this piece sum up Bresson’s notions on theater and photography.[xiii] What they reveal is a quite naïve confusion of a medium with what it conveys. A photograph of an object, whether it is a face, a landscape, or a sculpture by Donatello, is not intended to be a substitute for those things but simply a way of looking at the physical universe. The very same thing can be said of theater and of acting. Even Picasso admitted that "Art is not truth. Art is a lie that helps us to see the truth."

Painting and sculpture used to belong in this tradition – of transmuting objects and figures from nature in a manner that renders the objective subjective and that reaches the viewer by reversing the trajectory. The ultimate result is something that is neither nature nor the artist but a conjunction, an enjambment of realities. Andre Malraux could argue all he wanted about how modern art has destroyed what once connected the artist with his subject ("Cezanne did not wish to represent apples, he wished to paint pictures."[xiv]), but every work of art – even Cezanne’s – is as inseparable from nature as from the painter. Nature is not surmounted, destroyed or even supplanted by art: a distinct creation is born from the artist’s vision. And the object in nature becomes “something owned,” as Rilke put it. When Cezanne painted his mountain again and again, from every direction, in every light and season, he was approaching, approximating, the reality of the mountain.

By extension, photography is a realization of Blake’s admonition: “We ever must believe the lie/When we see with, not through, the eye.” Its dependence on a mechanical device does not make it any less creative. But in its faithful recording of the actual, photography has the ability to bring us closer to the things of the physical world. Intelligence intervenes every time the photographer aims his lens.
And all a filmmaker does is arrange real objects – people and places – before his camera. This may have become old-fashioned with the invention of CGI, but it is the art of filmmaking in a nutshell, whether it’s Cocteau’s Orpheus walking through mirrors into the underworld, or De Sica’s Umberto D nearly run over by a train. Bresson’s querulous rejection of these realities for one of his own devising may have been instrumental in the creation of his own crypt-like universe, in which everyone is a Caligari somnambulist who monophonically mutter the words of his idiosyncratic creed, but for everyone else it is a ridiculously limiting, arbitrarily exclusive, and ultimately pointless exercise.

[i] Robert Bresson, Notes on Cinematography, Johanathan Griffin, trans., New York: Urizen Books, 1977, p.3
[ii] Ibid., p. 59
[iii] “My first film was made with professional actors, and when we had our first rehearsal, I said, ‘If you go on acting and speaking like this, I am leaving.’” Bresson in an interview with Charles Thomas Samuels, Paris, September 2, 1970.
[iv] Both films attracted the admiring attention of a university newspaper critic named Andre Bazin.
[v] Samuels interview, q.v.
[vi] The “critics” in the 1950s were those writing for major periodicals. They were rarely, if ever, interested in – or indeed knowledgeable of – theoretical interpretation, with the exception of the radical Cahiers du Cinema, which initially attracted little attention outside France.
[vii] Dostoevsky ended his tale with Raskolnikov confessing his crime – at precisely the point at which he stood the greatest chance of getting away with it. Raskolnikov had actually proved that he was superior to the laws governing other people – which is why his discovery of Sonia’s love and his admission of guilt are so powerful.
[viii] Some of the greatest artists have drawn their inspiration from entirely spurious ideas. Robert Graves was one of the 20th-century’s greatest lyric poets, who swore lifelong devotion to a deity whom he called The White Goddess.
[ix] “In this age, sheer talk – the interview – becomes as much a part of a director’s life as anything other than directing itself.” The New Republic, Nov 27, 2006. Curiously, Bresson addressed the problem himself (without a trace of irony): “I hate publicity. One should be known for what one does, not for what he is. Nowadays a painter paints a bad painting, but he talks about it until it becomes famous. He paints for five minutes and talks about it on television for five years.” In Bresson’s case, his pronouncements on film got much wider circulation than his films, so that he was known by reputation in some cases years before his films were widely available.
[x] Samuels, q.v.
[xi] Mirella Jona Affron strains our credulity by comparing Bresson’s little book with Pascal’s Pensees. Feeble as philosophy, Bresson’s Notes have little application outside the strict confines of his work. (“Bresson and Pascal: Rhetorical Affinities”, Robert Bresson, James Quandt, editor, p.165).
[xii] “Most of what is said about me is wrong and is repeated incessantly.” Samuels, q.v.
[xiii] Bresson contradicted himself in the Samuels interview: “A book, a painting, or a piece of music – none of these things has an absolute value. The value is what the viewer, the reader, the listener bring to it.” Only a churl could not allow a photograph the same potential value.
[xiv] Andre Malraux, The Metamorphosis of the Gods, New York: Doubleday, 1964.