Bresson's Cinema

Those who are new to Robert Bresson will mostly find his films excruciatingly boring. Those who have known some of his best films, say, A Man Escaped, will find them intensely engaging, despite the seemingly uneventful progress, drawn by a certain obsessive anticipation, rather like waiting for Godot.

For two weeks the Film Forum screened his thirteen films, virtually his total output between 1943 and 1983, some of them for only one showing. I was able to see ten of them one after another, and the experience prompted me to note that the divided reception was a clue to the nature of Bresson’s cinematic art.

Briefly stated, one most conspicuous peculiarity of his films is that, whereas his screen images are uncompromisingly realistic, the film composed of them does not replicate reality credibly. The characters he constructs appear confused or even irrational, and he does not develop them narratively; very little happens in the film though what happens is described with stubborn persistence. So, it bores us, or else intrigues us and keeps us waiting. There is very little story in any of his films, the barest minimum of a plot only as inevitable.

Film for most people is narrative, and historically, with rare exceptions, film has always been narrative. Fiction or non-fiction, a film tells a story with images, dialogues, and narrated words, and actors impersonating characters or real personages acting themselves to develop an event of some interest. A documentary constructs a story as narrated by the documentarist or encapsulated in her or his point of view; a surrealist film, like those of Renais Clair and Buñuel, in its lack of coherence, did not fail to narrate the events in the subconscious world. A film without a story is a failure, and it bores the audience. Bresson fails to narrate and is not even abstract or surrealist.

From the middle of the 20th century, some filmmakers, as in Neorealism and the New Wave, moved away from the earlier theatrical artifice toward naturalism in pursuit of greater immediacy in the narrative. Fictional films began to adopt the documentary style, preferring to use the natural light and location, non-professional actors, loose plot construction, casual dialogues, and even a hand-held camera.

Bresson began to adopt some aspects of this style in his works starting with Le journal d’un curé de campagne (1951), the style ventured earlier by Vittorio De Sica in Ladri di biciclette (1945), in which the filmmaker creates a strong sense of the event as it might have happened in the real world familiar to the audience and makes the story more credible even though it is fictional. Bresson’s Le journal endows the images with a strong sense of reality -- of specific time and place; and yet the film feels removed from reality. In most of his films, there is only one protagonist on which the filmmaker’s interest rests. The narrative is thus biographical but only nominally because the scenes are arranged episodically rather than progressively. That is to say, though Le journal is nominally the story of the country priest’s life which starts with his arrival in the remote village and ends with his death, the events in his life, despite the voice-over reading of the diary, are given in haphazard episodes. The film minimizes the story and constructs something that is better described as a portrait.

The non-sequitur selection of episodic events is even more pronounced in Mouchette (1967), his last black-and-white film, in which the sequence of scenes contribute little to any recognizable passage of time; instead, they construct the living portrait of the girl lost in her world she barely comprehends. In both of these films the protagonist dies, as in most of his films, and the ending is not so much the culmination of her or his biographical life but more like a consummation of a life guided by some mysterious power above and beyond reality, comparable to the end of Joan of Arc on the stake after the trial in Le procès de Jeanne d’Arc (1962), nominally an event occurring in real time of the trial but, austerely reduced in action and setting, is characteristically a portrait in contrast to even Dreyer’s rendition of the saint.

In all his films, we can say, that Bresson, endeavors to minimize whatever contributes to the narrative fulfillment in the film, despite his insistence on the realism of the images, which was developed to enhance the realism of the story in Neorealism and the New Wave. For the length of the film our narrative interest is thus suspended, and we wait and wait, bored or intrigued, and the end is death, which somehow gives the meaning, not quite comprehensible to us no less than to the portrayed personage but somehow physically felt as an unforgettable experience, a meaning mysterious, perhaps transcendental, like Joan’s death on the stake, a salvation, in a deeply Catholic way of thinking ingrained in Bresson’s life.

The beings that Bresson captures in his film-portraits engage themselves almost blindly in what they do, docilely or else obsessively, as though guided by some power beyond their comprehension, transcending their activities. A mystery is a mystery because it is not totally comprehensible in a rational way; it reaches above and beyond our everyday experience, beyond what language can express. Mystic writers don’t describe but evoke their experiences, well aware of the limits of the words, and expect the readers to capture the mystery beyond comprehension. Poetry is, in fact, like that when it succeeds brilliantly. So, Bresson tries through his filmed images beyond what the images naturally communicate. He eschews symbolism, however, because his aspiration is not abstract ideas but some concrete experience of the transcendental; for this reason, realism of the images is essential to him. He does not construct a story; he does not replicate our reality; he uses the images of our everyday world to search for a meaning that somehow elevates us. It is not surprising that Bresson’s films demand to be seen repeatedly to be experienced more deeply fully.

In one of the oft-quoted epigrams, Bresson wrote: “A movie is born first in my head, dies on paper; is resuscitated by the living persons and real objects I use, which are killed on film but, placed in a certain order and projected on to a screen, comes to life again like flowers in water.”