Film-Philosophy
Journal | Salon | Portal (ISSN 1466-4615)
Vol. 5 No. 20, July 2001
Thomas Deane Tucker
A Patient Cinema or a Cinema of Patience?
(Robert Bresson for Foreigners)
Keith Reader _Robert Bresson_ Manchester and New York: Manchester
University Press, 2000 ISBN 0 7190 5365 X
(hardback) 0 7190 5366 8 (paperback) 166 pp. In the Preface to his short but
substantial work on Bresson, Keith Reader cites as the
catalyst for the book a very dramatic experience of
watching, or more appropriately confronting, Bresson's
laconic masterpiece _Journal d'un cure de campagne_ after
several previous viewings. Teaching, along with a colleague,
a course on French cinema at a British university, Reader
was a seasoned veteran of Bresson screenings but did not
share his colleague's enthusiasm for Bresson's work. Though
intrigued and impressed by the tight and methodic visual
organization of the films, Reader viewed Bresson's overall
form as oppressive and happily let his elated colleague
teach the material on Bresson. Although he doesn't actually
say it, I think it safe to assume that at this point Reader
thought of Bresson's work as overbearing, saddling his
audience with the extra burden of deciphering the
significance of heroic themes from a deliberately un-heroic
narrative structure and style. In other words, he found
Bresson to be 'boring'. The change came about when, owing to
his colleague's sabbatical, he found himself teaching the
whole of the French cinema course by himself at a period in
his life when he was going through an unnamed emotional
crisis. Reader writes: 'As the cross filled the silent
screen at the end of _Journal d'un cure de campagne_
(hereinafter _Journal_), I left the room in tears' (ix).
This might seem to some a confession hardly befitting a
scholarly approach to film studies, but to those who, like
myself, have had similar experiences in their engagement
with Bresson, such passion is almost unavoidable and can be
a professional asset to the film scholar adopting a
director-based approach to Bresson's work. The static image
of the empty cross confronting the spectator, juxtaposed
with the remarkable voice-over of the Bishop reading
Dufrety's fidelity to the dying priest' s pronouncement over
his own death, 'Tout est grace', is endemic of the
predicament in which Bresson places his viewer. Freeing
every element of the cinema to comply with the 'pen' of
Astruc's 'Le Camera-Stylo', Bresson writes his art across
the blank screen as if it were, to paraphrase Valery, a
'Riemann surface'. Bresson meticulously presents the
dehiscence of our everyday world like a gaping wound held in
reserve before the viewer's eyes. But at the same time,
Bresson carefully shaves the emotional content from his
images (and dialogue) through the elision of key
psychological details of his characters, placing the entire
ontology of the material world he so patiently constructs
'under erasure' to strip his audience of even the barest
possibility of a conventional emotional response. His cinema
is an art of patience, on both sides of the screen,
demanding that the viewer 'wait' through the intermittences
in a sort of decisive spectatorial performative act to allow
'intermittence' itself to speak. [1] A film like
_Journal_ seems deliberately 'foreign' to filmic discourse,
but usually after several re-viewings one begins to sense
the infinite distance measured in waiting through its
uncanny structure as an interruption of cinematic convention
that introduces 'waiting' as the true measure of human
expression, discourse, and communication.
[2] The book is a volume in the Manchester
University Press French Film Directors Series, whose aim, as
stated in the Series Editor's foreword, is to 'extend the
range of French directors known to anglophone students of
cinema'. Reader succeeds in this by combining detailed
descriptions of Bresson's individual films against their
historical backdrops with an engagement with the numerous
critical discourses -- ranging from Oudart to Predal --
generated by the films themselves. Reader navigates through
each of Bresson's fourteen films, organizing the book
through seven chapters which chronicle the development of
Bresson's individualistic style as a director, and one
chapter that focuses on Bresson's _Notes sur le
cinematogaphe_. He negotiates his passage through the films
along two intersecting lines of analysis: 1) a logical
chain, followed chronologically, through which Reader
correctly traces the 'patterns of evolution' of Bresson's
work; and 2) an attempt to account for the complex Catholic
discourse found in each of the films and to illustrate both
the scope and importance of this dimension to approaching
Bresson's style. [3] Reader introduces us to Bresson with
an orthodox but appropriate quote by Jean Cocteau: 'Bresson
is 'apart' in this terrible trade' (xi). Cocteau regarded
his epithet as enthusiastic praise for Bresson's uniquely
elliptical style, and Reader appropriates it as the epicycle
which will move through and structure the rest of the book.
The remainder of the Introduction is a mini-synopsis of the
themes (Bresson's laconic style, the refusal of detail
embodied by his narratives and characters, his refusal to
use professional actors) along with an explication of three
approaches to these themes -- Sadism, Lacanian, and
Catholicism -- to which Reader will return throughout the
book. At the end of the Introduction, Reader offers an
extremely brief one and a half page biography of Bresson.
But this is not too bothersome, because the discussions of
the individual films in the succeeding chapters revolve
primarily around Bresson's working methods and helps to
sustain further reflections upon more specific biographical
details from Bresson's life. Reader even sets Bresson apart from
himself, as the title of the first chapter ('Bresson before
Bresson: _Affaires Publiques_, _Les Anges du peche_ and _Les
Dames du Bois de Boulogne_') suggests. This chapter
adumbrates some of the elements of conventional cinema,
elements Bresson mostly avoided in his subsequent work,
which traverse these three early films. But Reader balances
this by carefully sifting through these films to uncover the
seeds of Bresson as an auteur -- the use of nondiegetic
music, the flattened out painterly quality of the
cinematographic image, the overabundance of the Catholic
(Jansenist) concept of grace, the elision of dialogue,
off-screen sounds, and the sado-masochistic qualities of
both his characters and *mise en scene* -- that will
progressively germinate throughout Bresson's
career. Chapter Two offers a detailed account
of _Journal d'un cure campagne_. Most of the chapter is
taken up by a lengthy synopsis of the film, but Reader does
offer some interesting insights into the way Bresson uses
the journal-device to dissect the problem of fidelity in a
film adaptation of a literary text. Though Reader culls much
of his argument concerning this issue from other sources,
such as Andre Bazin and Bernard Chardere, he transposes
these readings with an adroit application of Lacanian theory
to the overarching presence of the diary in _Journal_ that
at the same time refuses to reduce the function of writing
in the film to a psychoanalytical operation. To regard the
journal as a 'writing-cure' akin to Freud's 'talking cure'
is one way, but not the only way, to account for Bresson's
paradoxical fidelity to the 'spirit' rather than the
'letter' of Bernanos's novel. Consider the
following: 'The disappearance of images from the
screen at the end, likened by Bazin to the 'dark night of
the senses' of St. John of the Cross, is the film's final
exhaustion and transcendence of the possibilities of its
language . . . Exactly the same remark might be made about
the written verbal language of the priest's diary. That too
is 'only a sign, there is nothing beyond or 'behind' it; it
is the process of writing the diary, not any definitive
result it may bring, that has been important for the priest
and the film . . . Writing and speech in this film, rather
than being hierarchised, stand in undecidable recto and
verso to each other, and it is the passage through and
finally beyond them that leads to the final image'
(40). Reader briefly suggests that an
interesting relationship between 'writing' and the absent
body -- both the priest's and Christ's from the cross --
might be teased out of this static image of the cross, and
my only complaint is that he doesn't pursue this line of
argument further. [4] Chapter Three focuses on Bresson's
so-called 'prison cycle' (_Un Condamne a mort s'est
echappe_, _Pickpocket_, and _Le Proces de Jeane d'Arc_), and
stresses the thematic and stylistic similarities and
differences between the three films. In these films Bresson
fully emerges as a *mettuer en order*, rendering through
sparse and elliptical cinematographic gestures an equivocal
rhetoric of grace for the screen. Reader correctly views
Bresson's progressive juxtaposition of materiality with
spiritual themes in the prison cycle as giving the event of
filmmaking a sublime *mise en abyme* effect. The stress on
hands and action, a systematic concentration upon the
minutiae of physical detail coupled with the absence of
psychological detail of main characters, and a mixture of
the trivial with the transcendent, become familiar terrain
for Bresson at this stage. Once again, Reader's analysis
superbly folds the Christian themes glossed from the films
into psychoanalytical discourse, as when he juxtaposes a
reading of the dream-like quality of _Pickpocket_ as
reflective of the Freudian concept of *Unheimliche*, for
instance when Michel steals the banknotes from a woman's
purse at the racetrack. Reader asserts that the uncanniness
of this scene is derived from Michel's exhilarating feeling
of weightlessness 'closely associated in the Christian
mystical tradition with rising up towards God' (55). Bresson
heightens this sense of uncanniness by creating a tactile
space where Michel's hand seems to literally float across
the screen. The section of the chapter devoted to
_Le Proces de Jeane d'Arc_ is divided along two lines. The
first tracks the 'visual sadism' of the film in comparison
to the versions made by Dryer, Preminger, and Rivette.
Reader cites the many scenes in which Bresson's camera
'spies' on Jeanne through the spy hole of her cell door as
evidence of the latent sadistic qualities of the shots in
the film. The second line is a critical response (in regards
to the function of this 'visual sadism') to Jean-Pierre
Oudart's reliance upon the film to develop his theory of
spectator positioning and concept of suture. Reader argues
against Oudart's theory by turning to Philippe Arnaud's work
on the construction of cinematographic space to show how
Bresson constructs the shots of the trial scene so that the
viewer's spectating position is identified with Jeanne to
offset the 'sadistic voyeurism at work in the cell scenes'
(69). Chapter Four takes up Bresson's last
black and white films, _Au hazard Balthazar_ and
_Mouchette_. Almost eight pages of the chapter are devoted
to a summary of _Balthazar_, but it is not at all cumbersome
since Reader tells us in his Introduction that he views it
as Bresson's most important work and warns us to expect a
lengthy amount of space dedicated to it. I think readers
will appreciate his unknotting of the convoluting narrative
of _Balthazar_, which is a film that takes the concept of
replacing the actor with the *modele* to its most extreme
limits. Reader does an excellent job of evoking the
seriousness of what seems on the surface of a first viewing
to be a playful, or even childish narrative. And in his
analysis of _Mouchette_ Reader concentrates on Bresson's
sparse but poetic use of language, the significance of both
non-diegetic and diegetic sound, and the rich visual images
found in the film to make us appreciate the *texture* of the
film in comparison to Bernanos's text. The next two chapters deal with
Bresson's entry into color film, _Une femme douce_ and
_Quatre nuits d'un reveur_, both adapted from short stories
by Dostoevsky, and _Lancelot du Lac_, a retelling of the
Arthurian legend. Reader treats the two former films in one
chapter, and devotes an entire chapter to _Lancelot_ which
he subtitles 'Sixth time lucky'. In some aspects, this is
the tightest chapter in the book, offering highly original
ruminations on Bresson's forays into the representation of
what Reader calls the 'pre-modern body'. Most films set in
the Middle Ages, Reader argues, deploy the pre-modern body
'to a largely comic effect in a manner often spoken of as
Rabelaisian' (118). Reader sets Bresson apart from this
tradition by claiming: 'The lewd and the excremental, it
should now be clear, do not belong in Bresson's work, yet
the number of shots of legs and feet, human or equine, in
_Lancelot_ suggest that the specificity of his 'pre-modern'
body is nevertheless reliant on its 'lower stratum',
deprived of its comic possibilities through being encased in
armour and thereby much more close to tragedy than
Rabelais's ambivalence' (119). Such prose, reminiscent of Bataille's
_Tears of Eros_ when he writes about the enticing link
between death and eroticism expressed in medieval painting,
evokes the very materiality of Bresson's cinematography.
Reader goes on to argue that the opening and closing
sequences, which show blood spurting out from beneath the
butchered knights' armor, is the most telling example of the
body as tragic, marked on one side by the contrast between
the 'spouting gore and the metallic sheen of the armor', and
on the other -- like the empty cross in the final shot of
_Journal_, the disappearance of Jeanne's body from the stake
as the smoke lifts in the closing scene of _Le Proces_, and
the weight of Mouchette's unseen body heard in the sound of
the splash as she hits the water at the end of _Mouchette_
-- by the 'absence of a visible human body'
(119). After a short section on Bresson's
Pascal-inspired and aphoristic _Notes sur le
cinematographe_, Reader concludes the book with a chapter on
_Le Diable probablement_ and _L'Argent_ aptly titled
'Civilisation and its discontents'. Reader brings his
analysis of the struggle between Eros and Death in Bresson
to its culmination by tracing the circulation of desire
running through both films, as nihilism in _Le Diable_, and
in the form of money in _L'Argent_ . While I do not
completely agree with his overly theoretical reading of the
final shot of the bystanders gazing through the open door
into the cafe in _L'Argent_ (the last shot of the last
Bresson film) as signifying a 'perpetual opening, or even a
Mobius-like looping back into a body of work . . .', such a
reading is an elegant decanter to substantiate the
philosophical questions he set out to answer at the
beginning of the book. If I have seemed overly generous in my
praise for this book, aside from the fact that it is lucidly
written and thought provoking, it is because Reader,
mimicking the style of his subject, somehow manages to
distil the enigma of Bresson as a director down to its
essential elements and pares his study of Bresson's oeuvre
down to what is most critically necessary for his project.
The book boasts a comprehensive filmography, and will serve
as an excellent compendium in the classroom for both
teachers and students of French cinema. With this book,
Reader emerges as a leading voice in the next generation of
English-speaking Bresson scholars. In light of the aim of
the series editors to make French directors seem less
'foreign' to anglophone students of cinema, Reader's passage
through Bresson is a paragon of success. Chadron State College Nebraska, USA Footnotes 1. Blanchot, _The Infinite
Conversation_, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 78. 2. Ibid. 3. In the Introduction Reader quotes
Philippe Arnaud to describe his own approach to writing on
Bresson: 'The logical chain which can be followed through
Bresson's films: . . . chronologically, through his various
transformations -- actors replaced by models, fragmentation,
delayed identification . . . and aesthetically through the
constitution of his 'anti-system' or method' (8). 4. For slightly more on this thought,
see Reader's essay, 'D ou cela vient-il?': Notes on Three
Films by Robert Bresson', in James Quandt, ed.,
_Robert
Bresson_ (Toronto: Toronto
International Film Festival Group, 1998). Copyright © Thomas Deane Tucker
2001 Thomas Deane Tucker, 'A Patient Cinema
or a Cinema of Patience? (Robert Bresson for Foreigners)',
_Film-Philosophy_, vol. 5 no. 20, July 2001
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol5-2001/n20tucker>.
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