Robert Bresson 0968296912

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EDITED

BY

JAMES

QUANDT

Toronto International Film Festival Group 2 Carlton Street, Suite 1600 Toronto, Ontario M5B IJ3 Canada Selection, introduction and bibliography copyright© Cinematheque Ontario 1998 Pages 609-612 constitute an extension of this copyright page

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Main entry under title: Robert Bresson (Cinematheque Ontario monographs; no. 2) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-9682969-1-2 I. Bresson, Robert - Criticism and interpretation. I. Quandt,James II. Cinematheque Ontario. PNI998.3.B755R62 1998

Book design by Gordon Robertson Printed in Canada

III. Series. c98-900930-o

Acknowledgements

The Bresson project is an undertaking of Cinematheque Ontario to make Robert Bresson's work available to a wide audience. It involves two closely related endeavours. In co-operation with various organizations, distributors, producers, and other cinemdtheques, Cinematheque Ontario has ensured that new 3 5mm prints of all ofBresson's feature films were struck, and has organized a North American tour of over a dozen sites to present the retrospective. Designed to accompany the retrospective, the present volume modestly addresses the marked lack of recent English language scholarship and criticism ofBresson's work. The Bresson Project has been made possible by the exceptional generosity, efforts, and encouragement of many individuals and organizations, particularly Robert and Mylene Bresson; the Bureau du Cinema, Ministere des Affaires Etrangeres, Paris (Pierre Triapkine; Laurent Burin des Roziers; Janine Deunf); and le Service Culturel du Consulat General de France a Toronto (Fabyene Mansencal). All have supported the project since its inception, and their patient assistance throughout its often arduous development has been unstinting. Also important in making the retrospective possible were New Yorker Films, New York Qose Lopez); La Cinematheque Frarn;:aise, Paris (Dominique PaYni, Alain Marchand, Jacques Aumont); Canal + International, Paris (Ron Halpern); Veronique Godard, New York; Paramount Pictures, Paris; Editions Gallimard, Paris (Prune Berge, Julien Laffon); Netherlands Government Information Service, The Hague (G.A. van Leeuwen); Gian Vittorio Baldi; Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley (Edith Kramer, Judy Bloch); Catherine Gauthier, Cineteca Espafiola, Madrid; Alliance Frarn;:aise, Toronto; Nicole Jouve, Interama, New York; John Minchinton; Argos Films (Anatole Dauman, Florence Dauman, Barry Edson). I salute two friends and colleagues who inspired and assisted me throughout the organization of the retrospective: Lara Fitzgerald and Dorina Furgiuek, both

of whose :fineness of spirit was matched by their tenacity. Part "les dames" (in their mettle), part "les anges" (in their understanding and assistance), they contributed more than they know to the success of the project. Similarly, Catherine Y olles guided the assemblage and editing of this volume with such radiant intelligence, rigour, patience, and great good humour, that she deserves a large part of the credit for its existence. (Whatever faults the book has are mine.) My gratitude to all of the contributors, particularly those who wrote pieces especially for the book, and to the writers and copyright holders who granted the necessary permissions for the reprints. Gerry O'Grady of Harvard University did exceptional early research, and I also profited from the advice of Thomas Elsaesser, Raymond Bellour,Jonathan Rosenbaum, Kent Jones, and David Bordwell. The many directors who wrote commentaries on Bresson deserve warm appreciation, especially those I badgered throughout the making of their new films. Robert Gray contributed superb, discerning translations of several key articles, particularly that ofRene Predal, a major contribution to English studies of Bresson. Lara Fitzgerald also contributed fine translations of complicated texts, and generously advised me on my own. David Kilgour expertly copy edited one section of the book. And Gordon Robertson accomplished the elegant design with a veteran sense of calm and refinement. Rosemary Ullyot of The Film Reference Library offered her usual unflagging, informed research assistance, and Robin MacDonald compiled the bibliography with her customary intelligence and magnanimity. Chris Gehman brought his fine eye, diligence, and acumen to the planning of the book. I am, of course, also indebted to my colleagues at Cinematheque Ontario and the Toronto International Film Festival Group. And, as in all my ventures and obsessions, the understanding and support of Richard Nordahl makes every endeavour possible. James Quandt Senior Programmer Cinematheque Ontario

Note to the Reader

Assembling a collection of essays such as this poses problems of consistency. For example, the titles ofBresson's films vary from essay to essay; some retain the original French titles, others employ the English translations (which also vary), and some mix both. Similarly, the dates assigned to Bresson's films deviate; some use the year of production, others the year of release. In a number of cases, we have standardized these details, but have largely observed the original intentions of the writers, which accounts for the variances. A glaring inconsistency in Bresson studies is the translation of his Notes sur le cinematographe, which has appeared in at least two editions, one titled Notes on the Cinematographer, the other Notes on Cinematography. Less important but worth noting is that the title of the Tolstoy story on which L'Argent is based is translated three different ways. In both cases, we have chosen not to standardize these references.

Contents

Introduction JAMES QUANDT

The Last Filmmaker: A Local, Interim Report

17

JONATHAN ROSENBAUM

Le Journal d'11n wre de ca111paine and the Stylistics of Robert Brcsson

27

ANDRE BAZIN

The Universe of Robert Bresson

41

AMEDEE AYFRE

Spiritual Style in the Films of Robert Bresson

57

SUSAN SONTAG

Robert Bresson: L'Aventure interieure

73

RENE PREDAL

The Rhetoric of Robert Bresson: From Le Journal d 'un cure de campagne to Une femme douce

117

P. ADAMS SITNEY

Cinematography vs. the Cinema: Bresson's Figures

145

P. ADAMS SITNEY

Bresson and Pascal: Rhetorical Affinities MIRELLA JONA AFFRON

165

Affaires publiques WILLIAM JOHNSON

Rules of the Game: On Bresson's Les Anges du peche

193

TONY PIPOLO

On Robert Bresson's Film Les Anges du peche

211

ROLAND BARTHES

Film Form/Voice-Over: Bresson's The Diary of a Country Priest

215

NICK BROWNE

Bresson's Un condamne amort: The Semiotics of Grace

223

ALLEN THIHER

Picking Dostoevsky's Pocket: Bresson's Sl(e)ight of Screen

235

T. JEFFERSON KLINE

Breaking Silence (Forty Years Later)

275

BABETTE MANGOL TE

"D'ou cela vient-il?": Notes on Three Films by Robert Bresson

283

KEITH READER

Bresson and Music

299

DONALD RICHIE

Sound as Symbol in Mo11chette LINDLEY HANLON

Bresson, Dostoevsky

325

MIREILLE LA TIL LE DANTEC

The Sheen of Annour, the Whinnies of Horses: Sparse Parametric Style in Lancelot du Lac

339

KRISTIN THOMPSON

Despair Abounding: The Recent Films of Robert Bresson

373

MICHAEL DE.MPSEY

A Stranger's Posture: Notes on Bresson's Late Films KENT JONES

393

The Devil Probably: The Redemption of Despair RICHARD ROUD

L'Argent ALBERTO MORAVIA

The N cgative Vision of Robert Bresson

,f

I I

RAYMOND DURGNAT

The Question Interview by JEAN-LUC

453 GODARD

and

MICHEL DELAHA YE

Robert Bresson, Possibly Interview by PAUL SCHRADER

48 5

I Seek Not Description But Vision: Robert Bresson on L'AYJ?ent Interview by MICHEL CIMENT

499

Burel & Bresson Interview by RUI

513 NOGUEIRA

Filmmakers on Bresson

523

Filmography

593

Selected Bibliography Compiled by ROBIN Sources

MACDONALD

JAMES QUANDT

Introduction

It is with something clean and precise that you will force the attention of inattentive eyes and ears. - ROBERT BRESSON,

Notes on Cinematography

comprise a sparse canon of daunting beauty and difficulty. Aside from a short musical comedy, Affaires p11bliq11es (1934), a substantial part of which was recovered a decade ago, the French master made only thirteen films over forty years, a corpus of unparalleled stylistic consistency and influence. This collection of essays, the first in English on the director since Ian Cameron's The Films of Robert Bresson published in 1970, explores many aspects ofBresson's oeuvre, perhaps the most singular and uncompromising in the history of narrative cinema. Designed to accompany a retrospective of Bresson's films, the book surveys various interpretive approaches to his work, beginning with the Christian humanism of Andre Bazin and the Brechtian reading of Susan Sontag, which, along with the fine, influential limning of"Bresson's universe" by Amedee Ayfre, form a kind of locus classicus of Bresson criticism. Many of the subsequent articles refer to these three seminal works, and illustrate various recent approaches to Bresson's films: philological (P. Adams Sitney), semantic or semiotic (Allen Thiher, T. Jefferson Kline), Lacanian (Keith Reader), and neoformalist (Kristin Thompson). This section of the book, which includes several pieces either written or translated especially for it and reprints of numerous important articles on Bresson, is bracketed by two recent exegeses ofBresson's work: the first, Rene Predal's magisterial account of what he calls Bresson's "interior adventure," which also serves as a revie\\' of French literature on Bresson (Agel, Ayfre, Esteve, Deleuze, Arnaud, Bergala L't al), most of which awaits translation; the second, Raymond Durgnat' s omnivorous,

T

HE FILMS OF ROBERT BRESSON

JAMES QUANDT

l

eccentric (and exciting) traversal of the diverse philosophical, theological and artistic precepts that inform Bresson's style and vision. These twin explications, with similar structures, oddly seem to echo and contend with each other-on the subject, for instance, ofZola's and Courbet's affinities with Bresson, or the lack of human touch in his cinema-though Durgnat is more speculative and ecumenical, Predal more circumstantial. Accompanied by three of the most significant interviews with Bresson (by Jean-Luc Godard and Michel Delahaye, Paul Schrader, and Michel Ciment respectively), and commentaries by over thirty filmmakers on his work, this survey encompasses most of the important subjects and issues that are central to Bresson criticism.

The Early Films

The discovery of Bresson's musical comedy Affaires publiques, long thought lost, has produced a small body of critical work, most of it descriptive. In his concise account of the film, William Johnson notes the incipience of certain elements-a "clipped" rhythm, non-expressive acting, simplicity and detachment-of Bresson's mature style. Critics are paying increasing attention to Bresson's first two features, Les Anges du peche (1943) and Les Dames d11 Bois de Boulogne (1945), the latter recognized by Richard Roud in his study ofJean-Marie Straub as a "universally seminal film." Long treated as works "apart" from Bresson's corpus--see, for instance, the essays of P. Adams Sitney and R. Bruce Elder-Les Anges and Les Dames are stylized, literary films, elegantly written by Giraudoux and Cocteau respectively, their highly wrought language the opposite of the spare, intoned speech Bresson would subsequently employ. Both are shot with noirish contrasts by Philippe Agostini (as compared to the muted greys of Bresson's succeeding films, shot by L.H. Burel); and acted with swank authority and-in the case of the indelible Maria Casares in Les Dames-high theatricality (again as opposed to the inexpressive simplicity of the non-professional actors Bresson called "models" in his later works). Recently, critics and scholars have reinterpreted these early works, despite their marked differences from the rest ofBresson's oeuvre, as either foreshadowings of his mature style and vision, or as the first substantial expressions of the same, emphasizing their interiority and economy-Raymond Durgnat here calls them "relentlessly precise"-and their themes of sacrifice and redemption. (Even P. Adams Sitney, who sees them more as products of the French cinema of that period than of an auteurial impulse, writes: "If we scrutinize them, we can find embryonic traces of some of Bresson's later achievements.") Tony Pipolo's complex interpretation of Les Anges du peche (a chapter of his upcoming book on

2

Bresson), while careful not to impose a Bressonian design on the film with the benefit of hindsight, demonstrates that it "is the first instance of the theme and moral imperative that drives all of Brcsson's narratives." Similarly, Rene.'.· Prc.'.·c.ial finds in Les Dames du Bois de Bouloine the first marked instance of what he calls "the parable of closed space" or imprisonment that is so central to Bresson's vision; and Gregory Markopoulos notes Bresson's use of "exaggerated sound" in the film, a prefiguration of Bresson's process of selecting and "orchestrating" natural sounds in his later work.

The Emergence of the Bresson Style

Les Anges du peche and Les Dames du Bois de Boulo,(?ne can now be seen as part of the "unified field" of Bresson's work, but it was with Diary ef a Country Priest ( 19 5 1) that Bresson developed the severe, minimalist style with which he became identified and which altered only slightly over the years, though his subjects and sources ranged widely. David Bordwell writes elsewhere that Bresson established a "preexistent stylistic system which can reduce almost any subject to its own terms." This "system," which Bresson called le cinematographe, arose out of his desire to make the cinema express the ineffable, to give it what he called "an interior movement." Bresson's determination to inscribe in the profane imagery of the cinema the spiritual quandary of isolated people in search of grace led him to remove from his films everything he considered extraneous and false. The concept of depouillernent, with its connotations of stripping or paring away-sometimes to the point of deprivation-best describes this ascetic process. The Pascalian aphorisms Bresson gathered in his book, Notes on Cinematography, distinguish between his system of le cinematographe which he associated with abstraction and precision, with music and painting, from that of cinema, which he associated with theatre, with fraudulent realism, vulgarity, and facile psychology. Bresson's terse, runic observations are, asJ.M.G. Le Clezio asserts in his introduction to the Notes, "for the invention of a new language, for perfection." (Many have mistaken Bresson's strictures as scripture, taking their counsel as a kind of spiritual doctrine, when he seems to have written and assembled them in a pragmatic spirit of self-exhortation.) The style Bresson evolved to express his vision of the quest for redemption in a barbaric world, the "new language" Le Clezio refers to, can be defined in terms of denial, renunciation, and avoidance. (Bresson wrote admiringly ofDebussy's playing the piano with the lid down, an apt metaphor for his own approach.) His images are starkly composed, flattened, and stress frontality in a manner that has been compared to Byzantine iconography, and to the paintings of Picro della Francesca,

JAMES QUANDT

3

Giotto, and Vermeer. (In his Notes, Bresson writes: "Flatten my images (as if ironing them), without attenuating them.") He scrupulously avoids establishing shots, minimizes the movement of both camera and players, limits camera angles and distances, and severely reduces the number and types of settings, abstaining at all costs from pictorialism and the traditional "landscape shot." (Bresson: "Not beautiful photography, not beautiful images, but necessary images and photography.") The resulting environment becomes a neutral ground, a cantus firmus, for Bresson's charged images of gestures and glances, of isolated objects and empty spaces, of parts of the body (hands and feet especially) and the oft-remarked doors he frequently fixes on-never merely doors in Bresson's cinema, but portals for the soul.

Sound

Bresson's use of sound is similarly unique, and one of the most admired and analyzed in all cinema. His statements on sound have become a kind of theology for some filmmakers, so contrary are they to the conventions of traditional cinema. Bresson instructs: "When a sound can replace an image, cut the image or neutralize it. The ear goes more towards the within, the eye towards the outer." From Diary of a Country Priest onwards-most markedly in the employment of natural sounds in A Man Escaped (1956) and the celebrated jousting tournament in Lancelot dtt Lac (1974)-Bresson increasingly uses sound as a replacement for, rather than an adjunct to or reinforcement of, his images. (Bresson's aesthetic emphasizes the process of divination, here sensory intuition.) Just as he often focuses on "vacant" spaces, the camera lingering after a character has departed, for example, Bresson emphasizes silence: "Be sure of having used to the full all that is communicated by immobility and silence." Andre Bazin famously asks: "Is Journal just a silent film with spoken titles?" Though almost every writer on Bresson comments on his use of sound-it is all but unavoidable-Sitney's discussion is exceptionally specific and intelligent, and the clarity and suggestiveness of Lindley Hanlon's analysis of Bresson's use of "sound as symbol," as a source of emblematic meaning, in Mouclzette (1967) reveals why her book on Bresson is so indispensable. Voice is one of the central uses of sound in most cinema, and, again, Bresson's employment of voice is both unique and complex. Corresponding with the gradual elimination of music in his films, his dialogue becomes increasingly laconic; the austere Diary seems positively loquacious compared to the taciturn late films. (It requires over 8 50 subtitles, where Mo11chette and L'Argent-both admittedly shorter films-require 225 and 256 respectively.) Bresson's use of voice-over, particularly in such films as Diary and Pickpocket, is also singular, even strange, and

has prompted considerabk :malysis. Andn'.· Bazin 's L'Ss.1y on the r.1dic.il ".1c,thctic principles" of Diary explores the "originality and boldness" of Brcsson 's :--tvlistio with such noble lucidity that it has become a cL1ssiL· uf film criticism. B.1zin is one of the first and most observant analyses of what became .1 distingui,hing . . fc.1turc of Bresson's cinema-a strange one in a process of ascesis, in tlut it invoh-cs .1 repetition, a doubling: the pkonastic duplication of text :md inuge . (the ctm:·'s .1ourn.il in voice-over describing what the images show us). Nick Browne's css.1y on_/i1rm1,i/ (unfortunately less well known than his excellent work on the "rhctoric"of .--111 hasard Balthazar) examines this peculiar device and how "di~junction, independence, interrogation, and even negation of the im.1ge. by the sense of the text, is .is much a feature as illustration or duplication." T. Jeffcrson Kline's ingenious .m.ilv. sis of Pickpocket emphasizes the unreliability of the ,·oice-m·n, how the im.1ge or the inferred narrative often directly contradict what thL' eponymous petty crimi11.1l tells us.