Robert Bresson Films | Robert Bresson Filmography | Robert Bresson Biography | Robert Bresson Career | Robert Bresson Awards

Robert Bresson began and quickly gave up a career as a painter, turning to cinema in 1934. The short film he made that year, Affaires publiques, is never shown. His next work, Les Anges du p?ch?, was his first feature film, followed by Les Dames du Bois du Boulogne and Journal d'un cur? de campagne, which firmly established his reputation as one of the world's most rigorous and demanding filmmakers. In the next fifteen years he made only four films: Un Condamn? ? mort s'est ?chapp? Pickpocket, Proc?s de Jeanne d'Arc, and Au hasard Balthazar, each a work of masterful originality and unlike the others. Since then he has made films with more frequency and somewhat less intensity. In 1975 Gallimard published his gnomic Notes sur le cin?matographe.

As a whole Bresson's oeuvre constitutes a crucial investigation of the nature of cinematic narration. All three films of the 1950s are variations on the notion of a written diary transposed to a voice-over commentary on the visualized action. More indirectly, Proc?s de Jeanne d'Arc proposes yet another variant through the medium of the written transcript of the trial; Une Femme douce is told through the voice of the husband as he keeps a vigil for his suicidal wife; and in Quatre nuits d'un r?veur both of the principal characters narrate their previous histories to each other. In all of these instances Bresson allows the tension between the continuity of written and spoken language and the fragmentation of shots in a film to become an important thematic concern. His narrators tell themselves (and us) stories in order to find meaning in what has happened to them. The elusiveness of that meaning is reflected in the elliptical style of Bresson's editing.

For the most part, Bresson employs only amateur actors. He avoids histrionics and seldom permits his ?models? (as he calls them, drawing a metaphor from painting) to give a traditional performance. The emotional tensions of the films derive from the elaborate interchange of glances, subtle camera movements, offscreen sounds, carefully placed bits of baroque and classical music, and rhythmical editing.

The Bressonian hero is often defined by what he or she sees. We come to understand the sexual tensions of Ambricourt from a few shots seen from the country priest's perspective; the fierce desire to escape helps the condemned man to see the most ordinary objects as tools for his purpose; the risk the pickpocket initially takes to prove his moral superiority to himself leads him to see thefts where we might only notice people jostling one another: the film initiates its viewers into his privileged perspective. Only at the end does he realize that this obsessive mode of seeing has blinded him to a love which he ecstatically embraces.

Conversely, Mouchette kills herself suddenly when she sees the death of a hare (with which she identified herself); the heroine of Une Femme douce kills herself because she can see no value in things, while her pawnbroker husband sees nothing but the monetary worth of everything he handles. The most elaborate form this concentration on seeing takes in Bresson's cinema is the structure of Au hasard Balthazar, where the range of human vices is seen through the eyes of a donkey as he passes through a series of owners.

The intricate shot-countershot of Bresson's films reinforces his emphasis on seeing, as does his careful use of camera movement. Often he reframes within a shot to bring together two different objects of attention. The cumulative effect of this meticulous and often obsessive concentration on details is the sense of a transcendent and fateful presence guiding the actions of characters who come to see only at the end, if at all, the pattern and goal of their lives.

Only in Un Condamn?, Pickpocket, and Quatre Nuits does the protagonist survive the end of the film. A dominant theme of his cinema is dying with grace. In Mouchette, Une Femme douce, and Le Diable probablement the protagonists commit suicide. In Les Anges and L'Argent they give themselves up as murderers. Clearly Bresson, who is the most prominent of Catholic filmmakers, does not reflect the Church's condemnation of suicide. Death, as he represents it, comes as the acceptance of one's fate. The three suicides emphasize the enigma of human will; they seem insufficiently motivated, but are pure acts of accepting death.?P. ADAMS SITNEY