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Vol. 5 No. 20, July 2001
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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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