Bresson's A Man Escaped

Bresson’s films are insistently anti-narrative even though they may appear otherwise. I have already written how he subverts the convention of realism in the images he uses, and directs us to an experience that transcends reality. A Man Escaped, 1956, more than any other film of his, tempts the audience to see it as a neorealist narrative because it is nominally a thriller describing an escape from a prison; and it suspensefully engages the audience from the beginning to the end.

But, as a thriller, A Man Escaped is shoddy. What Bresson shows in 102 minutes is significantly uneventful; it consists of preparations for the escape but lacks large events, like a near exposure, a near escape, and a reverse of fortune. There are no large actions -- no accident, no scuffle, no fracas, no chase. Throughout the film, the camera focus on the face and hands of the prisoner Fontaine as he chips away the wall with a spoon, tears shirts into strips and braids ropes, and makes makeshift hooks; it veers away from him only occasionally, no more than absolutely necessary. His interaction with other inmates is sketchy; dialogues are minimal.

The screenplay, written by the director himself, was adapted from the real event, an account by André Devigny himself of his escape from a Gestapo prison in Lyon; and Bresson was meticulous in shooting on location and recreating the replica of the cell as well as the details of the costume and props, even using the ropes and hooks used by Devigny that had been preserved.

Documentary in visual style, the film nevertheless fails as a documentary film; the geography of the prison complex, even of Fontaine’s cell, is never made very clear. Then, the voice-over narration, instead of establishing a narrative continuity, elaborates only in segments, what the images informs us. In the filmmaker’s own words: “Image and sound must not support each other, but must work each in turn through a sort of relay.”

The suspense we experience comes from the intensity of attention on the small cumulative actions, not from the overarching adventure. We know from the start that Fontaine escapes. The title announces it; it is more explicit in the original French title: Un condamné à mort s’est échappé. Bresson’s interest lies not in the actions shown per se but the obsession of bewildering depth in which we are forcibly made to partake in and experience. It is toward this end that he deploys the realism of the documentary style, strikingly in opposition to what was conventionally developed to bring us close to the empirical reality -- the impression of being there and then ourselves; instead, he shows an experience beyond its surface and insists that what seems ordinary is extraordinary. Something transcendental guides Fontaine to the escape he prepares for, without his being quite aware of it, and the final escape is a liberation as of death itself in Bresson’s other films.

The full title, in fact, reads: Un condamné à mort s’est échappé, ou le vent souffle où il veut. The second title comes from St. John 3:8, which translates as “The wind bloweth where it listeth” in King James, and “The wind blows where it wills,” in a modern version. What completes the verse, well understood in the phrase, is profoundly significant: “. . . and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goes; so is every one that is born of the Spirit.”