Film-Philosophy
Journal | Salon | Portal (ISSN 1466-4615)
Vol. 5 No. 21, July 2001
David Sterritt
Bressonians on Bresson
_Robert Bresson_ Edited by James Quandt Toronto: Toronto International Film
Festival Group, 1998 ISBN 0-9682969-1-2 612 pp. Robert Bresson is unknown to the
overwhelming majority of moviegoers, but among those who
have cultivated an acquaintance with his oeuvre he is an
artist to inspire superlatives. This may be a
self-fulfilling situation, since Bresson's stylistic
mannerisms depart so radically from those associated with
conventional cinema that only spectators who find some sort
of initial appeal in his approach -- whether despite or
because of the aesthetic and hermeneutic challenges it poses
-- are likely to explore his works in the detail that's
required if they are to be even minimally appreciated and
understood. This said, some of the smartest and savviest
contemporary critics and scholars have been motivated to
explore those works with notable care, and have returned
from their investigations with enthusiastic reports about
the artistic, philosophical, and even metaphysical value
they have found therein. Many of these commentators have found
their way into _Robert Bresson_, the invaluable new
anthology edited by Canadian critic and curator James Quandt
as the second instalment in Cinematheque Ontario's ongoing
series of auteur-centered monographs (a volume on Japanese
director Shohei Imamura was the first). Quandt himself
establishes the tone in his Introduction, which begins by
citing the 'daunting beauty and difficulty' that pervades
what is 'perhaps the most singular and uncompromising
[oeuvre] in the history of narrative cinema' (1),
and ends by calling it 'among the most exalted poetry in all
cinema' (15). Shortly thereafter, American writer Jonathan
Rosenbaum ratifies such encomiums with the personal touch
that often characterizes his criticism, noting in his essay
('The Last Filmmaker: A Local, Interim Report') that among
his most cinematically sophisticated acquaintances he doubts
whether there are many -- 'if any' -- who do not consider
Bresson to be 'the greatest of all living filmmakers' (17).
Bresson died in 1999, but his reputation has hardly declined
since Rosenbaum wrote his remarks a couple of years earlier,
as the appearance of Quandt's beautifully produced
collection -- and the travelling retrospective of Bresson
films that it was designed to accompany -- itself attests.
Many would agree with filmmaker Agnieszka Holland, who said
in a 1995 comment (reprinted in the book's 'Filmmakers on
Bresson' section) that he 'is one of the giants of the last
fifty years of cinema. Maybe *the* giant' (560). Some of Bresson's enthusiasts have
been drawn to his work initially by its sheer physical
allure, or -- to be more precise about this important
Bressonian issue -- its sheer physical *presence*,
manifested through what Rosenbaum calls the 'brute reality'
(19) of his images and sounds. My own admiration for Bresson
was sparked to some extent by my first encounters with the
sensuously rhythmic editing of _Pickpocket_ (1959) and the
poignantly etched pictorialism that punctuates _Au hasard
Balthazar_ (1966); and, while my preferences within his
later films incline toward the rigorous framing of _Lancelot
du Lac_ (1974) and the astounding stasis in the valedictory
shot of _L'Argent_ (1983), I still confess an affection for
the color-enhanced urban romanticism of _Four Nights of a
Dreamer_ (1972), the most problematic of his major films but
a vibrant and seductive vision nonetheless. Rosenbaum adds
another dimension to this matter by contending that
Bresson's films tend to be diminished or even annihilated in
their sensory impact (and therefore their impact, period) if
not experienced via 35mm prints properly projected onto a
large theatrical screen. (I have had some stirring Bresson
viewings via 16mm prints and even VHS videocassettes, but I
tend to agree with Rosenbaum on this; hence I insisted on
film prints for all screenings in the Senior Seminar on
Bresson that I taught at Columbia University recently, and
most of my students heartily concurred with this
approach.) All of this said, however, it is
Bresson's tendency to raise imposing philosophical issues
that gives his oeuvre the kind of lasting, self-renewing
resonance that only works of impressive intellectual
magnitude are likely to attain. Different commentators have
emphasized different interests and concerns within this
broad category, as the present anthology demonstrates, and
Quandt concisely summarizes them in his
Introduction. Under the rubric of aesthetics we find
the questions raised by Bresson's unconventional style,
which marks all of his films starting with the 1951
masterpiece _Diary of a Country Priest_. (Some of its
idiosyncrasies also appear in his two earlier features, _Les
Anges du peche_ (1943) and _Les Dames du Bois de Bologne_
(1945), as such contributors as Rene Predal and Gregory
Markopoulos suggest.) It is the distinctive qualities of
this style that separate Bresson's system of
'cinematography', associated by Quandt with 'abstraction and
precision . . . music and painting', from conventional
systems of 'cinema', which lean toward 'theatre . . .
fraudulent realism, vulgarity, and facile psychology' (3).
Chief among Bresson's stylistic traits are unusual
deployments of sound, including voices and music, and a
preference for nonprofessional 'models' over trained
performers. The latter is an especially controversial
predilection that reduces the appeal of Bresson's films for
audiences expecting mimetic or dramatic acting; but it
reflects the sincerity of his desire to capture the
existential reality of authentic human figures
'[c]apable of eluding their own vigilance, capable
of being divinely 'themselves,'' as he wrote in _Notes on
the Cinematographer_, his 1975 collection of observations,
admonitions, and meditations. [1] Also central to
Bresson's style are his intertextual allusions to a wide
range of works in painting (e.g. Vermeer, Giotto), music
(e.g. Mozart, Schubert), literature (e.g. Bernanos,
Dostoevsky), and cinema (e.g. Dulac, Renoir), which sundry
essays in Quandt's volume adduce in sundry ways. More pointedly philosophical are
matters that Quandt groups under the heading 'A Cinema of
Paradox', including the productive tensions within Bresson's
work relating to surfaces and depths; analysis and
synthesis; hopefulness and despair; minimalism and
plenitude; the expression and suppression of emotion; the
utilization and occlusion of narrative elements;
corporeality and transcendence; physics and metaphysics.
Moving next into terrain that's as proper to theology as to
philosophy, Quandt recognizes that one cannot meaningfully
engage with Bresson unless one considers his fascination
with Blaise Pascal (whose _Pensees_ exerted a strong formal
and ideological impact on his thinking) and with Jansenist
doctrines involving questions of predestination, free will,
the possibility of grace, and the knowability of the divine
presence. Some critics identify these issues as formative
influences on the Bresson oeuvre, while others see them as
enigmatic mysteries that Bresson sought to probe and wrestle
with rather than understand and elucidate. This leads to the
key question of whether Bresson should be considered a
'transcendental filmmaker', per Paul Schrader's argument in
his influential book _Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu,
Bresson, Dreyer_, [2] or an artist with a persistent
inclination toward the 'atheistic', or at least the
'materialistic', or at very least the 'concrete', as
Rosenbaum (21) and others have maintained. My own
inclination vis-a-vis the 'transcendentalism vs.
materialism' issue is to see Bresson as an implicitly
Derridean artist who not only (a) sees such matters in
profoundly dialogical terms and (b) accepts the
inevitability of their ultimate nonresolution but also (c)
actively embraces semiological contrast, conflict, and
contradiction as epistemological and ontological virtues,
viewing such tensions as sources of an all-embracing
*differance* that provides spiritual comfort precisely
because mere human understanding cannot begin to encompass
it. These are among the issues most
germane to a thoroughgoing engagement with Bresson's work,
and Quandt has artfully dealt with them in assembling his
anthology. Although he has chosen not to divide the
collection into sections and subsections with descriptive or
analytical labels, he has organized the essays in such a way
that they loosely trace the development of Bresson criticism
as it has evolved since the appearance of Andre Bazin's
seminal article '_Le Journal d'un cure de campagne_ and the
Stylistics of Robert Bresson' in 1951. Bazin's essay is
placed near the beginning of the book, right after the
contextualization provided by Quandt's introduction and
Rosenbaum's pithy 'interim report', followed by two
similarly influential pieces: 'The Universe of Robert
Bresson', by Amedee Ayfre, which played a strong role in
Schrader's thinking on transcendental cinema; and 'Spiritual
Style in the Films of Robert Bresson', by Susan Sontag,
perhaps the best-known American essay on the
subject. Further along, the versatile scholar
P. Adams Sitney pursues his 'philological' approach in two
nicely complementary essays ('The Rhetoric of Robert
Bresson: From _Le Journal d'un cure de campagne_ to _Une
femme douce_' and 'Cinematography vs. the Cinema: Bresson's
Figures'), and Mirella Jona Affron probes crucial territory
in 'Bresson and Pascal: Rhetorical Affinities'. Bresson's
early films are explored in essays by William Johnson, Tony
Pipolo, and the ever-helpful Roland Barthes, while
specialized aspects of the oeuvre are probed by Nick Browne
(unconventional use of off-screen narration), Donald Richie
(music, discussed with a fluid blend of scholarly
information and critical perception), and Mireille Latil de
Dantec (the Dostoevsky connection). Keith Reader, Michael
Dempsey, and Kent Jones each focus on particular clusters of
Bresson films, with Dempsey and Jones casting particularly
helpful light on later works. Kristin Thompson's meticulous
essay, 'The Sheen of Armour, the Whinnies of Horses: Sparse
Parametric Style in _Lancelot du Lac_', is a superb example
of neoformalist film analysis, although readers not already
familiar with Bordwellian approaches may find it unwieldy at
times. Another superior offering is 'The Negative Vision of
Robert Bresson', by Raymond Durgnat, an overview of the
oeuvre touching on everything from the Pascallian puzzles of
'Bresson and the Hidden God', to Bresson's relationships
with various schools of realism, to a look at his
'Phenomenology of the Spirit' and what Durgnat calls
'Christendom's Last Stand', most of it handled with brisk
wit and cogent intelligence. Also present are essays by Pridal,
Allen Thiher, T. Jefferson Kline, Lindley Hanlon, and
Richard Roud, plus a 35-part section labeled 'Filmmakers on
Bresson', ranging from brief paragraphs by Michelangelo
Antonioni and Aki Kaurismaki to lengthy commentaries by the
gifted avant-garde cineaste R. Bruce Elder and the ornery
Austrian auteur Michael Haneke, with a single provocative
sentence by cinema saint Chris Marker thrown in for good
measure. A group of interview pieces includes Schrader's
memorable _Film Comment_ miscommunication with the master
(wittily called 'Robert Bresson, Possibly') and Michel
Ciment's conversation with Bresson about _L'Argent_. Rui
Nogueira's interview with cinematographer L-H Burel is
notable mainly for the latter's ironically short-sighted
criticisms of _The Trial of Joan of Arc_, a film that
carries Bresson's asceticism to such extremes that even some
of his admirers are hard-pressed to defend it, although they
shouldn't be. But the extraordinary _Cahiers du cinema_
colloquy between Bresson and interviewers Jean-Luc Godard
and Michel Delahaye is worth the price of the volume in
itself, if only for its record of a rambunctious encounter
between two of French cinema's most gifted and radical
modernists, neither one of whom has much use for interviews
in general or self-exegesis in particular. To provide at
least one brief excerpt is irresistible: Godard: I do not see the difference
between an actor and a non-actor, since in any case he is
someone who exists in life. Bresson: But there, to my mind, there
is the point, it is about that that everything turns . .
. Godard: If one has a theatre actor,
then one must take him . . . good Lord, as what he is: an
actor, and one can always succeed . . . Bresson: Nothing can be done about it
. . . Godard: A moment comes, yes, when
nothing can be done about it, but there is a moment, too,
when one can do something. Bresson: I have tried, in the past.
And I almost succeeded in doing something. But I realized
that a gulf was being hollowed . . . Godard: But it is all the same a man,
or a woman, that one has there, before one. Bresson: No. Godard: No? (464; ellipses in original) And a bit later: Godard: It is true: a moment comes
when actors are rotten, but, finally, when you take a
non-professional, from the fact that you take him to have
him do certain things in a film, he is acting. In one way or
another, you are having him act. Bresson: No. Not at all. And there
indeed is the point. Godard: Finally . . . let us
understand each other about words: you are having him
live. Bresson: No. And then there, we arrive
at an explanation . . . which I would prefer to leave for
another time. (465; ellipses in original) It is both amusing and alarming to
find such short-circuited understanding between two
filmmakers who have so much in common. (Providing evidence
of their shared sensibility in this conversation, Bresson
describes his filmmaking as '[p]ainting -- or
writing, in this case, it is the same thing' (483) to
Godard, who one year earlier had described himself as
'painter and writer' in his 1966 masterpiece _2 or 3 Things
I Know About Her_.) A cover-to-cover reading of Quandt's
anthology unsurprisingly reveals that not every page is
worthy of equal attention. Even good essays may contain
disappointing material; see the simplistic comments on
religious labels like 'Christian atheist' near the beginning
of Durgnat's contribution, for example, or the false
distinctions he makes in a superficial critique of
psychoanalytic thinking (411, 443). Some items appear to
have been included because they have interesting authors
(filmmaker Babette Mangolte, author Roberto Moravia) rather
than productive ideas. And some portions are stronger on
creative thinking than on simply getting the facts straight.
For example, Reader's analysis of Mouchette's death would be
more persuasive if the 'twofold disappearance' of her body
(from the screen, under the water) really did find
correspondence in 'the absence of the voice' from the
Monteverdi passage heard at the film's conclusion. But the
voice isn't absent from this music, and while its perfectly
audible presence doesn't badly damage Reader's overall
argument, it injects a distracting note that could easily
have been avoided. (Ditto for occasional errors in Reader's
generally strong book _Robert Bresson_ -- e.g. a quick check
would have shown that _American Gigolo_ is Schrader's third
film as a director, not his first. [3]) There is strikingly little second-rate
writing in this enormous collection, however, and that
stands as a signal achievement by Quandt, who deservedly
earned a special award in 1999 from his American colleagues
in the National Society of Film Critics for this book and
the film series that he organized at the same time. He has
made a large and lasting contribution to Bresson
studies. Long Island University New York, USA Footnotes 1. Robert Bresson, _Notes on the
Cinematographer_, trans. Jonathan Griffin (London: Quartet
Books, 1986), p. 67. This volume has also been published as
_Notes on Cinematography_, creating the same sort of titular
confusion that is generated by the circulation of most
Bresson films under both French and English titles. I have
chosen to use the titles that I deem most familiar to
English-speaking viewers and readers, but I have not
standardized them when quotations depart from my usage.
(Quandt does the same.) 2. Paul Schrader, _Transcendental
Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer_ (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1972). 3. Keith Reader, _Robert
Bresson_ (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 60. Copyright © _Film-Philosophy_
2001 David Sterritt, 'Bressonians on
Bresson', _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 5 no. 21, July 2001
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol5-2001/n21sterritt>.
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