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    Vol. 5  No. 21, July 2001
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    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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